A Bedtime Snack That Won’t Make You Fat

A Bedtime Snack That Won’t Make You Fat

An old expression goes like this: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” So, to be healthy, have a big breakfast, a lighter lunch, and don’t eat much at night.

It’s not that simple, of course, but many successful diet strategies cut off your eating a few hours before bed. Many in the intermittent fasting brigade are even shifting their eating windows: instead of skipping breakfast, they skip dinner. More than a few studies show that eating a lot before bed can have negative effects, and it goes beyond just ingesting too many calories. The devil is in the details, or in this case, the devil is in the macronutrient makeup of your pre-bed snacks.

Eating more before bed (as opposed to earlier in the day) also raises insulin, fasting glucose, and triglyceride levels, adding to a negative metabolic profile (1). The body just doesn’t seem to “handle” those calories as well, which might lead to a disruption of your appetite-controlling hormones.

However these studies were usually conducted using average-people food. And the average person makes terrible food choices. So what happens if you switch out the carby or fatty snacks for protein? Research published in The Journal of Nutrition sheds some light.

So, if you want to switch out your normal snack for a shake, use a lower-carb protein powder that contains a lot of casein, preferably far-superior micellar casein like that found in MD Protein (on Amazon)

Protein First… and Last

This protein-at-night trick slots nicely into what we call the protein-first eating strategy 64. In short, pump up your protein intake to about a gram per pound of body weight and everything else pretty much autoregulates and takes care of itself.

Make your last snack of the day with 30-40 grams of protein and you’ll much more easily reach that target number.

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