The best time to eat dinner is 3 hours before bedtime, allowing the stomach to properly digest and focus on preparing for sleep when bedtime rolls around the corner. Eating small amounts of foods like complex carbs, fruits, veggies, or a small amount of protein will satiate hunger pains and help you fall asleep faster.
Experts recommend waiting at least three hours after you've eaten to go to bed. This allows your body time to digest your food so you're not up at night with an upset stomach, indigestion, or acid reflux. And it helps you stay asleep. Don't forego a meal to follow this rule.
Good snack-friendly foods to have available if you get hungry include fruits, nuts, berries, plain yogurt and cottage cheese. Try to avoid bringing low-nutrient food choices into your home. If less nutritious snacks are not within arm's reach you won't be tempted to eat them.
Going to bed hungry may be OK if you're meeting nutrition requirements on a daily basis or following a healthy weight loss plan. In many cases, a healthy eating schedule may result in you feeling hungry before bedtime.
“If you are hungry, you should eat something, regardless of the time of day,” says Aimee Takamura, registered dietitian and director of wellness and sustainability at Restaurant Associates. “The act of eating late at night does not affect metabolism or lead to many of the adverse effects you may have heard of.
Best for Better Sleep
"Bananas are mostly made up of fast-digesting carbs, and fast digestion is definitely your goal when you're snacking before bed. They're also a good source of magnesium, which helps calm stress hormones and can promote sleep," Batayneh says.
Burning calories from digesting food
Eating 3 hours a day is meant to help your metabolism stay active and burn more energy. Your body uses some of the energy you get from food to digest. Eating every 3 hours is meant to keep your metabolism burning more calories through digestion than if you ate less often.
Get Meal Timing Right with RISE
There's no set time you should stop eating before bed, but as a guide, you should aim to have your last meal two to three hours before going to sleep. Avoid late-night meals, late-night snacking, and nighttime eating as much as possible.
What happens if you sleep after eating? If you sleep directly after eating, you'll probably encounter indigestion, heartburn, and other digestive problems that disrupt nighttime sleep. You also increase your risk of unhealthy weight gain, obesity, and poor health over time.
The foods with the longest time to digest are bacon, beef, lamb, whole milk hard cheese, and nuts. These foods take an average of about 4 hours for your body to digest. The digestion process still occurs even when asleep. Which means our digestive fluids and the acids in our stomach are active.
After you eat, it takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through your stomach and small intestine. Food then enters your large intestine (colon) for further digestion, absorption of water and, finally, elimination of undigested food. It takes about 36 hours for food to move through the entire colon.
However, by going to bed on an empty stomach, your blood sugar level may drop, also referred to as hypoglycemia. The condition can be dangerous for people with diabetes and other critical health issues. Even in healthy folks, low blood sugar levels can cause headaches and dizziness and negatively affect sleep.
It's completely normal to wake up hungry. While a grumbling stomach first thing in the morning might not feel so great, you can easily fix it by eating a nourishing breakfast after hopping out of bed. Waking up really hungry doesn't automatically mean that there's something wrong with your dietary lifestyle or health.
"When it comes to weight loss, going to bed a little bit hungry can help because it keeps hormones like insulin low, and that can help facilitate weight loss," Davis says. But she reiterates that having a big dinner right before bed has the opposite effect.
It's important to drink enough water during the day, however, it can be disruptive if you drink directly before bed. Avoid drinking water or any other fluids at least two hours before sleeping to prevent waking up at night.