One of the most common problems of modern society is excess weight. According to statistics from the World Health Organization, more than 1 billion people on the planet have health problems due to extra pounds. In this situation, monitoring your weight and health is vital. But doing this is not as easy as it might seem at first glance.
Scientists predict that by 2025, 20% of the world's population will be obese . This problem is relevant for people of various professions and social status, gender, age and place of residence. About 50% of Europeans are overweight, and 30% of them are obese. In Russia, these figures are 30% and 25%, respectively, but according to statistics among young people, this figure is steadily growing. Obesity has become a global epidemic.
And this problem is much deeper than changing clothing sizes. Obesity leads to serious illnesses. Arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus, reproductive dysfunction, atherosclerosis - this is not a complete list of problems that obesity can cause. And people just want to be slim and beautiful. Many today have simply given up in the fight against extra pounds. But experts are sure that there is a way out - to refuse food after six in the evening .
Why is it good not to eat after six?
“I don’t eat after six,” every person who is concerned about their own health and excess weight has said these words to themselves at least once in their life. Many nutritionists support this method of getting rid of accumulated kilograms. After a working day, a person does not need so much energy, because physical activity decreases, and the calories that enter the body in the evening do not have time to be burned and turn into fat deposits.
Another reason why you should give up eating “after six” is that proper sleep is not possible on a full stomach. When a person is in a horizontal position, the digestive tract works with difficulty, calories are not consumed, and as a result the sides grow.
The third reason to avoid evening meals is due to enzymatic activity. Its peak occurs at noon, and gradually decreases in the evening. Therefore, everything eaten in the evening lies as a dead weight in the stomach until the morning, contributing to the formation of toxins. This is fraught not only with the accumulation of excess weight, but also with the failure of various body systems.
What can you eat to avoid gaining weight?
The main rule when losing weight is to constantly feel hungry. In order to cope with this problem, you need a proper diet. A healthy diet consists of completely avoiding foods high in fat and calories, and including cabbage, peppers, lettuce and dairy products in your diet. Gradually, it will be necessary to reduce not only calories, but also the size of portions consumed.
The enemy of a slim figure is bad habits, like drinking tea in the evening with cookies and a piece of cake or eating in front of the computer and TV. A person unknowingly absorbs a large amount of food and stops when heaviness occurs in the stomach.
In order to take your mind off the constant feeling of hunger, you can take a warm bath, do something you love, or go for a walk in the fresh air. However, if you have an unbearable desire to sit down and eat, you need to take a teaspoon of honey.
Low-calorie snacks will help you distract yourself and avoid gaining extra pounds, such as:
- bran and fermented milk products;
- vegetables without starch;
- greenery;
- fruits and berries.
You can mix bran with kefir and drink it 30 minutes before bedtime, which will not harm your figure. For fitness girls, such a combination will help strengthen and restore energy reserves.
Ideal healthy snack options include seafood, low-fat stewed or baked fish, and an egg omelet. Such ingredients increase metabolism and are easily digested without causing heaviness in the stomach.
Why can't you not eat after six?
To be fair, it is worth noting: the postulate that eating after six is harmful is relevant for those who go to bed around 10 p.m. If a person goes to bed around midnight, the last meal may well be moved to a later time. It’s not about the number “six” on the clock, but about a certain time interval that must be maintained before going to bed without consuming food. The main thing in this matter is a clear schedule, which helps to debug the processes inside the body.
Cinnamon.
Sometimes an increased feeling of hunger is associated with metabolic characteristics. If there are such problems, it is worth helping the body with a proven auxiliary drug. For example, to improve metabolism and lose weight - cinnamon capsules. Cinnamon not only reduces cravings for flour and sweets, helps reduce fat, but also normalizes blood sugar levels, increases performance and improves mood. It will be a good help for those who have decided to put things in order in their life schedule.
And in the evenings, people are drawn to the refrigerator when they are trying to relax after a hard day, are used to eating in front of the TV, or cannot deny themselves a portion of sweets.
Why evening dinner leads to weight gain and what not to eat
Sweets and high-calorie foods contribute to weight gain. In order to lose kilos and keep your weight stable, you need to exclude the following foods from the menu:
- various sauces - mayonnaise and ketchup;
- sandwich snacks;
- fatty meats and varieties of sausages;
- any sweets;
- carbonated drinks;
- a large amount of raw vegetables and fruits.
Additionally, it is worth reducing the consumption of foods that are difficult for the body to digest and cause fermentation in the stomach. If you decide not to have a late dinner, you should go to bed by 10 pm. Otherwise, you can get very hungry and lose your temper.
Not every person can resist severe hunger, so you should divide dinner into 2 small portions. After 30 minutes from the last meal, you need to eat a second serving, thereby maintaining a full stomach until the night.
Eat small and regularly
In order not to eat after six, you need to have time to eat everything before six. This is of course a joke, but there is some truth in it.
To suppress your evening appetite, you should not ignore breakfast, and during the day you need to provide 5-6 meals. This will prevent the development of acute hunger. And of course, you need to reconsider your daily diet. No smoked meats or chocolates, only vegetable salads, chicken breast or turkey, fish, cottage cheese, greens. This is quite enough to keep you feeling full throughout the day.
The benefits of evening fasting
You can get your body in shape without giving up food. What to eat in the evening to lose weight and how to properly organize your diet?
Nutritionists recommend not eating after 6 pm, as they know that metabolism is slow at this time.
Everything you eat during this period will be deposited in fat cells and “strategic” reserves. By limiting your meals in the evening, you will consistently lose 1.5 - 2 kilograms of excess weight in just a week.
The benefits of evening fasting are:
- stabilization of hormonal levels;
- improving the functioning of the nervous system;
- normalization of the gastrointestinal tract;
- elimination of excess weight.
The well-known dogma that breakfast should be hearty and that it is better to skip dinner altogether is based on the biorhythms of the human body. Metabolic processes slow down after 6 pm, so everything that is eaten can harm your figure.
If after breakfast you go to work, workout, or a walk, then after dinner in most cases you just go to bed.
In addition, it has been proven that effective weight loss occurs at night. Help your own body without overloading it with food for the coming sleep!
Help your body maintain proper nutrition
One of the main “evening” problems is sweets. It is enough to eat one piece of candy to trigger a ravenous appetite. If you don’t have enough willpower to give up sweets, you should pay attention to helpers. The combination of dietary fiber and vitamins promotes weight loss, effectively helps cope with hunger and restore strength after serious physical and mental stress.
How effective is refusing to eat after 18:00 and how not to eat
Those who have managed to limit themselves to eating after 6 pm consider this method of losing weight to be effective, the results of which are visible after 30 days. True, in this situation, the individual characteristics and age of a person play an important role. The younger he is, the easier it is for him to lose weight.
Within a week you can get rid of 6 kilograms, in a couple of months you can lose 20. Thanks to the lost body weight, the heaviness in the stomach will decrease and the body will become more energetic. True, you can’t overdo it with drinking liquids to satisfy your hunger.
Such actions can cause swelling and complications of certain pathologies of the body. Some of the plain water can be replaced with green tea without sugar. Avoiding a late dinner will help cleanse blood vessels and increase metabolic activity.
If you adhere to this rule, then food will not become a heavy “burden” in a person’s stomach. Subsequently, the person will not look dull and gray-faced in the morning. If you fall asleep hungry every evening, then after many hours of sleep you can see in the mirror rosy cheeks, joyful eyes and a flat stomach.
Disadvantages of the diet
For many people, such a restriction seems uncomplicated. After all, you can continue to enjoy sweets, smoked meats and even French fries. Some women continued to drink their favorite beer, as well as vegetable and fruit juices and red wine.
But sweet and alcoholic drinks are very high in calories. Although, if a person was hungry before consuming them, a glass of juice is allowed.
There are other important points:
- Going to bed on an empty stomach is often difficult - this is what many users think, however, in this case, the morning appetite is also reduced. Although, if a person goes to bed without eating at all, he makes up for lost time at night by emptying the refrigerator.
- Not everyone can eat at 17.30 or half past five. After all, some people continue their working day or the person is in transport.
- There are jobs with night shifts or ending after 20.00 - 21.00, and sometimes later. Then you have to have a snack at home around midnight.
- When a lady allows herself to go with her husband, boyfriend or girlfriend to the theater, concert or cinema after work, it is obvious that she will return home late. Long events are difficult to endure without food, given that the journey home will also take from half an hour to an hour and a half. Therefore, you will have to eat either during intermission or at home.
More on the topic >> Lemonade diet “Master Clean”
Admit it: you're a glutton
It is not difficult to determine your tendency to nocturnal hyperphagia. Olga Lushnikova advises those who eat late at least twice a week to be wary, consuming at least a quarter of the total daily amount of food eaten in the evening and night hours. In addition, such people most often have no appetite in the morning, but soon after dinner or at night they have an uncontrollable desire to snack. Gluttons suffer from insomnia or have difficulty falling asleep, and in the evenings they complain of a bad mood and are convinced that only food will help them sleep. Such a person eats alone, quickly and greedily, because he is ashamed of gluttony and hides it from others. While eating, he cannot stop, suffers from feelings of guilt and even hates himself. ⠀
According to Alena Barredo, evening overeating may be due to the fact that a person does not distinguish appetite from hunger. Late-night dinners can lead to obesity, but this is far from the worst thing that a bad habit can lead to.
If you eat foods containing fast carbohydrates before bed, the body begins to produce the hormone insulin. As a result, the production of growth hormone at night is inhibited, and fat reserves are not only not burned, but are also added. Insulin is also associated with the stress hormone cortisol, which contributes to accelerated aging of the body. An increased level of insulin in human blood leads to the development of diabetes mellitus and atherosclerosis, obesity, hypertension, disruption of the intestinal microbiota and other diseases. Alena Barredo
endocrinologist, nutritionist
The specialist draws attention to the fact that with an excess of insulin, so-called glycemic swings occur, which have a detrimental effect on psychological health. Due to disruption of serotonin synthesis, constant depression, nervous breakdowns and even psychosis appear. All this is typical for those who like to eat before bed.
Photo: depositphotos/stokkete
Metabolic restructuring
The biggest mistake is the habit of eating a heavy dinner. By the way, this is how sumo wrestlers eat. During the day they eat 10, or even 20 thousand calories, and they do not give dinner to the enemy, they eat after six in the evening and eat heavily.
Eating once a day and in the evening forces the metabolism to work very actively, but not for long, and the rest of the day the metabolic rate will be at a minimum level. The slower the metabolism, the less it breaks down the excess and the more it deposits it in the tissues. If you are not preparing for the sumo championship, then you should not rebuild your metabolism.
Even if you don't sleep at night, your body prepares for sleep mode as soon as you remain in the dark. The brain centers secrete the hormone melatonin, or “night hormone.” It rearranges the functioning of clock proteins in clock genes. Clock genes, in turn, activate genes involved in the regulation of glucose, lipids, heart and liver function.
You eat more than you need
© cyano66 / Canva
Often after six we eat not because we are hungry, but simply to enjoy food. Moreover, the food we choose is not of the highest quality. Watching a football match, a movie or an entertainment show is traditionally accompanied by a snack. We have beer, chips, popcorn, and fast food in our hands and then in our stomachs. All of these fatty, high-calorie foods are unhealthy, even if you eat up to six of them.
The food that enters our body is used as a source of energy. By eating the contents of the refrigerator after six and then going to bed, you simply do not use calories. One thing that happens to unused calories is that they accumulate as fat. When you wake up in the morning, you may feel hungry again, because what you ate during the night has already been digested. The stomach is empty, and when the working day begins, the body craves more energy in the form of food. “Convincing” the body to use what you ate the day before after six will no longer work. It has already stored all this in the form of fats “for reserve”. And the body agrees to burn fat extremely reluctantly, since it is a very energy-consuming process. The glucose-starved brain is more likely to force you to eat something sweet than to tolerate the feeling of hunger. This daily routine leads to you simply overeating.
Will nighttime eating affect your appearance?
© Victor_69 / Canva
Have you heard that children grow in their sleep? It turns out that this is indeed the case. Growth hormone, which is released in the evening, stimulates the synthesis of new proteins. Children grow and adults rejuvenate overnight. This is the secret of Sophia Loren's youth and slimness. The famous actress, who is 85 years old, loves to eat. Throughout her life, she never deprived herself of high-calorie spaghetti, but she did not eat it in the evening. Exactly at 9 pm the diva goes to bed. No snacks at night, because the beautiful actress knows that the body recovers overnight, and youth can only be preserved by taking care of your health.
But if we interfere with nighttime processes by loading the digestive system, we simply create a stressful situation for the body, causing the adrenal glands to release stress hormones. Cortisol and adrenaline destroy proteins, carbohydrates and fats, that is, they do not have a rejuvenating effect, but the opposite, damaging effect. Thus, the authorities have to postpone the “repairs” and take care of your late dinner.
Misunderstanding on the part of the liver
© jaNULLa / Canva
The liver works day and night. During the daytime, she works more on processing foods, medications, and toxins. As evening approaches, the liver begins to produce cholesterol. Yes exactly! The body produces 2/3 of its cholesterol in the liver. Clock genes regulate cholesterol synthesis through the activation of a special enzyme (HMG-CoA reductase). The enzyme is active at night and practically does not work during the day. Knowing this feature, doctors prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs specifically in the evening to suppress the enzyme. What happens if we add “external” cholesterol to our “internal”? After being absorbed from the intestines into the blood, cholesterol is immediately stored as fat!
Eating after six significantly reduces the liver's ability to neutralize toxic free radicals and metabolize glucose. Against this background, your liver is damaged much faster and the risk of cirrhosis and cancer increases.
Japanese scientists found that 70% of patients with cirrhosis had high glucose levels, which were associated with people's habit of eating dinner late at night. The weakening of antioxidant protection is the beginning of the growth of malignant cells.
