- How your dinnertime affects your mood
- The best time of day to digest food
- If you need to lose weight, try this one thing
What is the healthiest time to eat?
For instance when are you eating dinner tonight?
(Or maybe you call it ‘tea’ in your neck of the woods.)
Do you generally eat it early, or late?
And is it at the same time every night, or does it vary?
Don’t panic, I’m not about to turn up at your house looking hungry, expecting a place at the table.
It’s just that your answers could have an impact on your health.
You see, as a young man, I used to eat around 9pm earliest, but sometimes later because I’d get distracted by my housemates.
Or I’d forget about eating then frantically phone for a takeaway, or drive to a late-night garage.
Sometimes I’d be eating a big meal at 11pm!
Even in the early days of my marriage, Lara and I had dinner in the late evening, once we’d had a chance to decompress after work.
Then along came children.
Suddenly, I was eating at 6pm every night, so that my screaming toddlers could get to bed on time (and so that I could bring out the WINE and collapse on the sofa).
Even though I’m now relatively child-free (one surly teenager daughter notwithstanding) I never really switched back to my old habit of eating late.
I get pretty hungry at 5.30 and I’m usually tucking into some grub by around 6.30 or 7ish.
And I’ve been feeling pretty smug about this too because, by all accounts, eating earlier in the evening is better for weight control.
If you eat an early evening meal and then don’t consume anything more until around 8-9am, you give your body time to absorb and digest food and generally do its thing.
As I wrote in a previous Good Life Letter, your body’s microbiome has a circadian rhythm and needs a rest every day.
Experts reckon that 14 hours is what’s required.
So if you were to eat at 7pm and not eat again until 9am the next morning, you’d give it that much-needed break.
However, new research is suggesting that we stop eating even earlier – as early as 3pm!
But why would that be, and thus, what is the healthiest time to eat??
The best time of the day to digest food
Stopping your food intake at 3pm leads to weight loss, reduced belly fat and lower inflammation.
This is according to a presentation given at the European Congress on Obesity in Maastricht, based on research published in the journal, Nature Communications.
Not only that, but a consistent early dinner every day leads to a better balance of gut bacteria, which has all kinds of good knock-on effects, like better mood and stronger immunity.
So this is yet more support for the idea of ‘intermittent fasting’, which is defined as avoiding food for at least 14 hours every day.
The key is to carry on this fasting as regular as clockwork, using the same daily schedule.
Courtney Peterson, co-director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Core at the University of Alabama, says:
“We think benefits come when it is the same eating time window each day. The reason for this is you have an internal biological clock, called the circadian system. This clock makes you better at doing different things at different times of the day.”
She explains that people are most physically alert, with most testosterone production and optimum blood sugar control in the morning. That’s when your metabolism is more fired up and most efficient at processing food.
In her trials, people who ate before 3pm and stopped for the rest of the day were generally less hungry, with better blood pressure and more balanced hormone levels.
The reason for all this could be down to our primal wiring…
Because ask yourself…
Did our ancestors eat regularly every three hours?
No, we evolved to eat when we found sources of food… and survive for many hours, even a day or two, without it.
But in the modern world, because we know food is available, our brains trick us into feeling hungry every three hours.
So when you put in place the system of intermittent fasting, you’re replicating the way that your ancestors ate, which is much more in tune with your natural biorhythms.
This is why studies have shown that fasting:
- Increases your levels of catecholamines in your brain, helping you feel happier.
- Boosts levels of a protein known as BDNF which interacts with the parts of the brain responsible for memory and learning.
- Rewires your brain so that a short period of not eating becomes pleasurable, rather than torturous.
- Turns self-control into a habit, when every time you succeed your confidence grows.
In other words, it’s a long-term method of changing your relationship with food, lifting your general mood and re-programming your brain to enjoy abstinence.
And if you are struggling to lose weight – and you’re eating healthily – this strategy could make a significant difference.
However, my advice is to talk to a professional if you have any worries about an underlying medical condition like diabetes and also any history of psychological issues related to food.
And as for me… well… to be absolutely honest, I am not going to put in place a system where I stop eating at 3pm.
But I am going to continue my practice of eating an early evening meal, rather than a later one.
Because I am a freelancer, I am lucky enough to not have to commute, which means I can eat a leisurely breakfast at 9, sometimes even 10am, which still gives me that 14 hours respite.
But it’s worth giving it a go and seeing what works for you.
