How Your Dinner Time Could Affect Your Weight

Losing weight can feel like an uphill battle. Ideas about how to lose weight come from so many sources, and it can feel overwhelming at times with different approaches working for different people. But there are some simple tricks to make weight loss easier—hacks if you will. Among those tricks may be adjusting what time you eat dinner. Let’s take a look at how your dinner time could be affecting the scale.

Eating Late Could Mean Gaining Weight

There are many ways to help reduce weight, and one of those ways may be eating earlier in the day. One study, which was published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, indicates that an earlier dinner time,  defined as several hours before going to sleep for the night, may lead to lower weight and better weight management. 

Blood sugar levels were also lower in people who ate earlier in the day, as opposed to those who ate at a later time. That’s significant information for anyone who’s been trying to reduce their weight or who may be at risk for problems with their blood sugar. It's a small thing that doesn't even impact our food choices! And if it means that our blood sugar is better controlled and our weight loss is amplified, well, that's a pretty simple hack, right? But there are other factors, too.

Sleep Time Matters Also

The time that a person goes to sleep might affect their weight, too. Especially when they eat dinner close to the time they get ready for bed. The study looked at 10 male and 10 female volunteers and had half of them eat dinner at 6 pm and the other half eat dinner at 10 pm. All participants went to bed at 11 pm. 

They all ate the same meal, but the amount of fat burned was lower in people who ate at 10 pm. Additionally, the blood sugar levels were also higher in those people. That suggests that their bodies didn’t have time to “burn off” some of the sugar and fat before they went to sleep and that increasing time elapsed between food intake and bedtime allowed for more calorie and sugar burn to take place. So this could potentially be accomplished by adjusting bedtime as well as mealtime.

Night Owls May Not See as Many Benefits

If a person is a night owl, and consistently stays up very late, they might not see a big benefit from eating earlier in the evening. If a person stays up late and then they go to sleep in the early hours of the morning, long after their evening meal and after several hours longer than the gaps mentioned above, they seem to see a slightly reduced benefit. So clearly there's a sweet spot here.

In short, it appears to be the amount of time between the evening meal and bedtime that’s important. People who go to bed at a more average time, such as 10 or 11 at night, may be wise to eat dinner at 5 or 6 p.m., instead of later, to tune into that sweet spot. Others may want to try to mimic this 4-5 hour spread with their own schedule.

When Eating Early Isn’t An Option

Another way to use time management to help manage weight is to eat a bigger lunch and a lighter dinner. Managing weight can be easier that way because it allows for more digesting and less of a blood sugar rise before bed also. 

The bottom line with adjusting dinner time to focus on weight loss is that people who eat earlier in the day may see lower weights and lower blood sugar numbers over time. When people have larger meals at breakfast and lunch and smaller meals at dinner, they’re allowing their bodies to use what they’re giving them for energy throughout the day. Eating dinner earlier isn’t a guarantee of weight loss, but there are indications that it can help with weight management and blood sugar control when practiced consistently and every little bit really does help when we consider that weight loss is a journey, not a destination.

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