I’ve heard this phrase a lot and sometimes from the same people.
You see, the Internet is great for many things – I mean, if I want to know how tall a Mongoose is at shoulder level, I can ‘Google it’! Eh, voila, the answer is there within 0.23 seconds!
But the Internet can also be a dangerous place. When it comes to your health, you need to be careful what you search for and more importantly, what advice you take notice of.
You could get a hundred different answers to your one question. Which one do you believe or trust?
The purpose of my blog posts is to build trust with you (you obviously have to read them in the first place!) but I’ve been in the fitness business for a long time (since 1995, wow) and experience counts for a lot.
So, getting back to the question, “Won’t eating after 7pm make me fat?”
The answer is, “It depends what you eat after 7pm.” Let’s say you eat a short while before you sleep, and you have a bowl of pasta. Your insulin levels will rise to deal with the rise in your blood sugar. As insulin sensitivity drops drastically in the evening, your body will not be as responsive to the insulin at night as it is during the day.
Plus, you’ll be trying to sleep while your body deals with this extra blood sugar. You can’t burn it off as energy so where does it go?
Well, the blood sugar (created from the pasta in the form of carbohydrates) will be stored rather than used up. As a result, you will store more body fat if you continue with this routine.
When you’re sleeping, you’re in healing, repair and storage mode so you will store what you have just eaten.
If you’re really hungry in the evening, you could still eat lean protein and fibrous green vegetables within a couple of hours of going to bed to aid muscle tissue repair as you sleep – there is no interference with insulin levels with protein intake. Lean protein comes in the form of fish, meat, natural yogurt, nuts, seeds, cottage cheese etc.
So, by all means, eat after 7pm, but just be mindful of what you eat. Maybe have your pasta at lunch time instead.