Five Foods You Should Stop Eating at Night When Trying to Lose Weight

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – When ingested at night, certain foods may impair your sleep. In addition, they can make you hungrier the next day and decrease the levels of the hormones responsible for fat burning.

But there is more, according to Women’s Health magazine. Sleeping poorly reduces the body’s insulin sensitivity and the growth hormone levels that feed and increase muscle mass; and, in turn, increases cortisol levels (the stress hormone), as a study published in the scientific journal Diabetology points out.

For your health and fitness avoid these five foods:

Dark chocolate

This food contains caffeine, theobromine (another stimulant), and sugar. The first two can only sabotage sleep, while the latter can ruin your effort to lose weight. “Sleeping in a fast-acting sugar surge is the perfect environment to store fat,” says nutritionist Betsy Opyt.

Sauces and spicy foods.

Ingesting food or spicy sauces at least one hour before going to bed can cause sleep disorders and heartburn, warns Opyt.

Red wine

It is not advisable to drink alcohol before going to sleep. You may fall asleep more quickly, but you will hardly enter the deep, the restoring sleep stage known as REM, as Jim White, representative of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, explains. In an Australian study, some women drank wine before going to sleep and researchers at the University of Melbourne found that while resting their brains exhibited activity similar to that observed in individuals receiving light electrical shocks.

Coconut oil and goat’s cheese

Foods rich in saturated fat can satiate and contribute to accelerate the slimming process, but when you eat them too soon before going to bed, they may negatively impact sleep. This is because saturated fat tends to widen the valve that separates the lower part of the esophagus and the stomach. “And since it takes time for the fat to be digested, anything you eat takes longer to get back into the esophagus and will probably keep you awake,” White explains.

Sugar

Cookies and cakes are strictly forbidden foods to eat at night. White warns that sugar works as fuel for the body, that is if you ingest the substance before going to sleep, your carbohydrate reserves stored in the body have probably already shut off, and so the sugar will turn irreparably into fat.