eating at night - good or bad for weight loss?

[CliffStamp]

Originally Posted by Maxgain

You will lose about 600cals at night by sleeping alone. Therefore food that you consume will be used up.

The 600 calories is about right, it depends on the individuals BMR of course and the level of obesity. People who are overweight have a lower MR when resting - consider specifically in the above the goal was to *lose* weight, indication the individual was overweight to begin with. If the individual had a LBM of 135 lbs and was very overweight this could drop down to <300 calories.

The rest of the conclusion is completely wrong and ignores the fact that the body responds to foods as they are eaten and digested, it doesn't wait until the end of the day, take a tally of what was eaten and then go back and fill in the gaps supplying the necessary nutrients and raw calories.

As a trivial example, lets assume there are two twins with a BMR which requires ~2000 calories a day for optimal fat loss with minimal lean body mass losses.

One twin eats only 1400 calories throughout the day, thus he drops significantly under the optimal level for maximal lean body mass retention and thus consumes muscle throughout the day (your body doesn't of course know you are going to eat at night - it responds to food *as it is eaten*). This also forces a drop in his BMR.

Now at night just before he goes to bed he eats his remaining 600 calories, in the time that he is sleeping his MR drops far under the average that the 600 indicates (as that was averaged over the time he was awake and active), it also drops further still as he was catabolic during the day.

Thus the 600 calories is now a surplus *during the time it is digested* (again you body can't go back in time and supply it to the muscles earlier in the day - too late) and some of it will be stored as fat.

Thus the twin who ate late at night on an isocaloric diet suffered less fat loss and more lean muscle mass loss than the twin who ate according to his level of maximal activity.

As for 3 vs 6, you can't simplify to this extent either, it depends on the type of foods eaten. If you eat complex foods with decent amounts of fat at each meal then you can stretch digestion from a meal out to 3-7 hours, thus three meals can span a whole day.

If however you eat fast digesting foods, then a meal can be digested in under three hours, thus you need more than three meals. A lot of people working out need this spread due to all the very quick digesting foods like protein powders and low fat diets (fats greatly slow digestion).

-Cliff

[Firehawk]

Heres an interesting read Cliff...see what you make of this:

http://www.ast-ss.com/dev/qa_search/...xt.asp?ID=2508

[CliffStamp]

There are three main problems, first off all :

"if your total calories for the days versus the amount of calories you burn each day are appropriate"

ignores basic physiology, as your body doesn't work on a daily basis but on an "as is, where is" basis, as noted in the above twin example. You want to spread your calories out so that it induces the minimal starvation responce, which means the higher intake at the points of higest demand.

Secondly :

"Your body needs those high-glycemic carbohydrates within the three-hour window after your workout to repair and grow regardless of what time you go to bed."

There are two problems with this (a) you are not going to grow significantly while on a cutting diet, this is a fantasy, and (b) high GI spiking has never been shown to promote consistent muscle gains. The high anabolic responces are transient.

The actual factual basis for eating at night, is while on bulking diets when growth rates are high and thus you want a consisten AA level in the blood, thus you eat a slow digesting protein late at night, and in cases of extreme dedication, actually get up to eat if you sleep for more than 6 hours.

However you can't really make a large argument that this produces significant results long term because the people doing it are not larger than those who didn't . Looking at optimal performance, in fact it runs the other way. But this ignores a lot of other changes, such as a different in food quality and so on.

-Cliff