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Late Night Eating Makes You Gain Weight

Your Body Doesn’t Know (or Care) What Time it is

Eating at night might be part of your daily routine. When bedtime’s getting close, you’ve probably already gone several hours since dinner, and you may be feeling hungry. But everyone who’s ever offered diet advice says that late night eating will only make you gain weight. Of course, carrot sticks and celery probably don’t sound all that appealing at 10 p.m., so you might reach for the ice cream or some chips instead. Are you sabotaging your weight loss plans by doing so? Will you put on weight and need to go on a diet just from eating at night?

While this was once believed to be a surefire diet buster, late night eating is treated the same by your body as early morning eating. As long as you’re not taking in more calories than you burn through the course of a day, it doesn’t matter what time of day you eat them. So eating at night does not make you gain weight—with some caveats.

If you’re eating a lot at night because you’ve starved yourself all day, you’re probably taking in the majority of your day’s calories right before you go to sleep. While there’s no reason this should make you gain weight, it might if you’re practically binge eating before bed and taking in way too many calories.

This is a sign that you’re not eating right during the day. Plan to have regular meals so that you don’t end up starving at night or at any other time during the day. Eat breakfast as soon after getting up as you can stand, and space out meals and snacks so that you never go more than a few hours between eating. This not only helps keep your blood sugar levels more even throughout the day, it can help your stress levels , too.

Eating regularly, as opposed to eating one or two big meals or lots of snacks at night, helps your mood because even blood sugar levels can make you feel steadier and more stable. If you starve yourself so that your blood sugar drops, then go on a binge eating session that sends your blood sugar skyrocketing, your mood will jump from low to high and low again just as fast as your blood sugar.

Also, if you know you won’t ever feel like you’re starving and you’re not going to be miserably hungry because you’ve given yourself permission to eat regularly, your motivation will stay stronger and you’re more likely to continue on such a plan. Still, if you like eating at night, as long as the foods you choose fit into your eating plan, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Just use a daily calorie counter to make sure that you’re not going overboard on the day’s calories thanks to that midnight snack. Then, no matter how late at night you eat, you’ll know that it fits in with your plan and won’t sabotage your weight loss efforts, or make you gain weight, either.