You know what’s fun to do? Munch down a family sized bags of chips as you binge watch your favorite TV show before bed.
You know what’s not fun to do? Stepping on the scale the morning after, to discover your belly has expanded so much, you must lean forward to read your weight. Unsurprisingly, you gained another few pounds.
Frustrating isn’t it? Well, before you emotionally start blaming the evil carbs last night, listen up.
Eating at night isn’t the reason you’re packing on the squishy pounds. The idea that carbs at night are particularly fattening is actually laughable. In fact, carbs at night may be the little-known strategy towards your fittest physique.
Hold your skepticism for a second and let me explain all the context.
Before I get into carbs specifically, it’s important to debunk the myth that eating at night is bad for you.
You’ve probably heard quacks throughout your life yap about how your metabolism slows down when you sleep, so your body stores all late-night calories as stubborn fat. My parents and many coaches I’ve met were some of these quacks.
Perhaps, I’m being too harsh as it kind of makes sense in theory. When asleep, you’re laying down and not moving much, so many would conclude you’re burning fewer calories.
However, in reality, your sleeping metabolic rate is not much different than your waking metabolic rate. There is an initial drop, but it rises back up resulting in an average that nearly matches your basal metabolic rate (1,2,3,4). Obese individuals have lower sleeping metabolic rates, but this is also pretty negligible (3).
Furthermore, exercising increases your sleeping metabolic rate which everyone should be doing anyways (5).
Overall, sleep doesn’t significantly impact your metabolism, but even if it did, there’s no reason a meal would make you fatter whether you eat it later or sooner. When you eat the same number of calories, it doesn’t matter if your last meal enters your mouth before or after the sun goes down (6,7,8,12).
If you eat the same calories, you will get acutely fat from that meal regardless of when you eat (9,10). For example, a large fattening milkshake before bed is still a large fattening milkshake at any other point in the day. The calories in your food don’t magically multiply past 6:00 pm or whatever arbitrary time limit you’ve heard before.
Ultimately, gaining a net amount of fat long term comes down to the total balance of calories you eat, not whether those calories were late or early. If late night munching is causing you to overeat for the day, you most certainly can avoid eating past a certain time or you know, you could simply eat less during the day.
In addition, you can eat lower calorie foods because the type of late night “carby” foods that people commonly blame are merely high calorie foods that easily shoot you past your total caloric balance (11).
For example, chips, cookies, ice cream, brownies, French fries, and cheesecake all have just as much or more fat calories than carbs, yet ironically people blame the carbs in these foods. But like I said earlier, the exact macronutrient ratio matters less than their total caloric content.
In other words, never blame a specific nutrient before bedtime. That’s irrelevant. It’s about total calories by the end of the day.
Once you get your total caloric intake in check, you can implement carb backloading which is just a fancy word meaning to push your carbohydrate intake towards the end of the day. To be clear, carb backloading is not eating additional carbs at night on top of your current diet. That’s just adding more calories your waistline might not be able to afford.
So no, carb backloading isn’t an excuse to binge on a mountain of candy bars that could feed a neighborhood of trick or treating children.
But anyways, let’s look at why pushing carbs towards dinnertime in a controlled manner can be quite beneficial.
The first study was Keim et al conducted in a metabolic ward which is a super scientific chamber where everything is controlled for and as accurate as you can get (13). No dealing with human error because participants are provided all the food.
They took a group of women who received both an am and pm treatment.
The am group ate 70% of their calories in the morning and the pm group ate 70% of their calories in the evening with both groups having macro matched energy deficits. The am group had about 200 grams of carbs in the morning while the pm group had it at night.
Strength training and cardio were also implemented in both groups.
After 6 weeks, both groups lost weight. The am group lost slightly more weight, but the composition of their weight loss was quite unfavorable. They’d lost less fat and exponentially more muscle than the pm group.
The pm group lost mostly fat and a tiny bit of muscle revealing much better muscle retention. In other words, better body composition with carbs backloaded.
A more recent, longer term study in carb backloading is Sofer et al (14). This study took 78 Israeli police officers and divided them into 2 groups, a carb backloaded group, and a control group.
Both groups got macro matched diets which had more balanced ratios than the Keim study I mentioned. Both groups also had more realistic caloric distribution instead of the Keim study where 70% of food was eaten either in the morning or evening.
In this Sofer study (which I’ll be referring to a lot), the backloaded group ate pretty much all their carbs at dinner. In fact, the only carb sources they ate during the day were low calorie vegetables. The control group ate their carbs throughout the day, distributed relatively even between meals.
After 6 months, the carb backloaded group lost more weight, body fat, and abdominal fat. All hormonal, metabolic, and health measures which I’ll talk about in a second, improved more in the backloaded group as well.
There are few reasons why eating carbohydrates after it gets dark is so effective for a myriad of benefits. Let’s break them down.
The Sofer study looked at key hormonal syncing mechanisms, particularly with leptin and adiponectin (15). Let’s start with leptin.
Leptin a satiety or appetite suppressing hormone that tells your brain that you’re full (16,17). More leptin means more fullness and smoother fat loss. Unfortunately, leptin production decreases throughout the day and average leptin production decreases as you carry less body fat which is why you might experience additional hunger as you’re leaning out (18,21).
However, Ramadan fasting research has shown us, a single bout of insulin secretion (which is generally highest from carbs) in the evening altered leptin production favorably (19,20). It is then hypothesized that minimal insulin secretion throughout the day with a big boost at night can increase or at least slow down the decrease in average leptin production.
Indeed, the Sofer study found the carb backloading group experienced higher daily leptin production as well as a slower average drop while weight loss occurred. Pretty astounding considering the carb backloading group lost more body fat, which should further decrease leptin. Higher levels of fullness were also reported from the same group to confirm.
So not only does carb backloading improve average appetite, but it syncs your eating with when you’re hungriest. More carbs at night when leptin is lowest. Not to mention, hunger during the day is less risky as work distracts you from eating (22).
Adiponectin is the hormone that benefits inflammation, insulin sensitivity, and energy expenditure, all good things for health and weight loss (23).
After the 6-month Sofer study, the carb backloaded had much higher adiponectin levels. The group that ate their carbs throughout the day didn’t even reach statistical difference meaning the effects were slightly detectable, but not as noticeable as carb backloading group.
Let me reverse engineer some physiology to explain how carbs pre-bed enhances this awesome thing we love called sleep.
Melatonin is a sleep hormone that enhances your sleep which is converted from serotonin, a neurotransmitter that enhances your mood which is converted from tryptophan, an amino acid that crosses the blood brain barrier (24).
Highly insulinogenic foods like carbs and some protein sources promote tryptophan to cross the blood brain barrier and produce serotonin, both of which will get converted to melatonin (25,26).
The end result is higher quality sleep along with falling asleep faster, sometimes known as the carb knockout (27,28,29,30,31). Beyond this, carbs before bed also enhance sleep quality (37).
Furthermore, adding additional carbs to your last meal by eating less of them in earlier meals can further enhance sleep from the sheer size of the meal. Bigger dinner generally means better sleep due to fullness, hormonal enhancement, and additional nutrients to support bodily processes (32,33,34).
Eating a meal an hour before bed compared to 5 hours away produced deeper sleep during the initial stages (38). In the end, better sleep means better fat loss and muscle growth.
Nighttime and sleep in particular are key anabolic times for your muscles. Sleep is where hormones get optimized and muscles get repaired (35).
In addition, fat tissue is more insulin sensitive in the morning and less insulin sensitive at night (36). This means the nutrient partitioning ratio at night is better. In other words, the carbs you eat at night are more likely to be stored towards muscle tissue rather than fat tissue.
This is also why pre-bed protein is optimal, but that’s a topic for another article.
I should also clarify that all these pre-bed effects can be reaped 1-3 hours before hopping in bed. Pre-bed carbs doesn’t literally mean eating a potato in bed and closing your eyes immediately after the last bite slides down your throat.
If discomfort still occurs from nighttime carbs, slowly push the last meal back a few minutes at a time. If you still can’t tolerate eating within 4 hours before bed, your stomach is weak and your bloodline will likely be wiped out in a few centuries.
I’m kidding about that last part, well partially, but in all seriousness, give carb backloading a try. It’s a useful timing strategy to implement once you’ve learned how to control your total calories.
Oh and please send this article to all those dorks who mindlessly say eating at night is bad for you.
Vlahoyiannis, Angelos, et al. “A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression on the Effects of Carbohydrates on Sleep.” MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 14 Apr. 2021, www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/4/1283/htm.
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