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| Photo: blisstree.com |
When I was studying nutrition at UCLA in the early 2000s, there was a generally accepted meme about food intake and weight loss: Calories in vs. Calories out. On first glance, it makes sense. That's really all that should matter, right? How much we eat verses how much we burn will determine how much we weigh. Except with a decade more of research at our disposal, that doesn't seem to be the case.
There is a fascinating article in the April issue of More Magazine. I wish I could link to it here, but I can't find it online. It's called Make Over Your Metabolism - by Arlene Weintraub. I think she's on to something.
Researchers have discovered that our bodies possess something called "clock genes" that control "essential metabolic processes such as the burning of fat." They activate in the morning and wind down later in the day. Our bodies are much more likely to store (rather than burn) dietary fat after 3 p.m. And the later it gets the worse it is.
Ms. Weintraub references several studies where groups of participants ate equal numbers of calories but at different times of day. The people who front loaded their days, eating the most calories in the morning and tapering off later, lost significantly more weight than those who ate the same amount of food later.
I love eating late at night, always have, but a couple of months ago, I decided to start eating dinner at 6 instead of 8 p.m. and going to bed an hour earlier... a necessity to keep my sanity with a toddler in the house. Within weeks of doing this, I lost 8 pounds that I had been struggling with my entire adult life. It felt miraculous but was really just a matter of logistics.
We've always known that people who eat late at night tend to be heavier than those who don't, but most experts attributed that to eating more calories overall. People starve themselves all day and then can't control their food intake late at night. They gravitate toward calorie-dense, nutrient-scarce snacks, and eat mindlessly in front of the TV rather than at a table with other people. All of that likely holds true, but now it seems there's more to it than we thought. Later in the day, our cells actually can't burn those calories, particularly those that come in the form of fat.
The crappy part about this is we can't save up all of our calories for a cozy late-night snack fest and hope to come out even.
The good part is that we have a new, tangible tool at our disposal, one that doesn't require in-depth analysis or calorie counting. It's straightforward for once... eat more earlier and less later. Dig it.
