Why You Shouldn't Eat Before Bed

Lately, it seems like everyone is insisting that eating before bed is bad for your health. It can make you gain weight, it can hinder the quality of your sleep, or it may even prevent you from getting to sleep in the first place. But for many people, whether it's for social reasons or because a rumbly tummy keeps them up at night, avoiding those late night meals can be very difficult.

So what can you do about the problem? Is there any hope for someone who loves their nighttime snacks, but also wants to lose weight, improve their sleep quality, and maintain good health? Actually, yes, there is. Below, we will explain to you exactly how unhealthy it can be to snack before bed - and we'll even offer you some practical solutions to the problem.

Eating Before Bed Shortens Lifespan and Healthspan

Scientists are constantly discovering new and miraculous things about the human body that we've never known before. Recently, some of those discoveries have shed some mind blowing insight into how the body works. One of the most amazing things they've figured out is a little process called autophagy. Basically, long story short, when your body is subjected to a small amount of stress, it reacts in a million little different ways that make you stronger and more resilient to that stress. It's sort of like how the body develops an immunity to a bacteria or virus once your immune system wins the battle against it.

Of course, sometimes we take matters into our own hands and vaccinate ourselves so that our immune system doesn't have to fight that battle in the first place. And in a similar manner, you can trigger autophagy just as easily in your own body. One of the easiest ways to do that is to put your body into a fasted state for at least 12 hours out of a 24 hour daily cycle. The sooner you stop eating before bed, the easier it will be to adopt such an eating pattern, and the more effective your autophagy will be.

When you trigger autophagy in your body, it can help you look younger, feel better, and even live longer with a higher quality of life if you do it often enough. Conversely, if you never trigger autophagy in your body, it can have some pretty disastrous health consequences. Inflammation is a big one. Many people think of inflammation as the big, bad boogeyman that holistic medicine practitioners used to try and scare people into buying snake oil and avoiding traditional medical care. But it's actually a much more serious problem than most people realize.

Inflammation and Pre-Bedtime Meals

How, specifically, does going to bed right after a big meal cause inflammation? Well, it causes a domino effect of unhealthy metabolic actions that result in the following:

1. It raises your blood sugar
2. Your pancreas releases more insulin
3. This massive surge in insulin causes your blood sugar to crash
4. This blood sugar crash sends your body into panic mode
5. When your body is in panic mode, your cortisol (AKA stress hormone) levels spike
6. This triggers a cascade of inflammatory reactions in your body which stress your system beyond healthy levels

Now, don't get us wrong; the occasional acute inflammatory response is both necessary and healthy for your body. After all, without short bursts of inflammation, your body wouldn't be able to heal its wounds or fight against pathogens. But when this inflammation is constantly happening all the time, your immune system starts to go haywire and your body ends up attacking itself.

Late Night Meals Cause Adrenal Fatigue

Let's circle back around to talking about cortisol. Your adrenal glands are the ones responsible for moderating the release or reduction of cortisol levels in your bloodstream. But over time, if you produce too much cortisol and your adrenal glands are constantly running at full blast, they get worn out. This can eventually lead to a very serious condition called adrenal fatigue. Symptoms of adrenal fatigue include fatigue, weight gain, premature aging, brain fog, mood swings, and more.

Eventually, if left untreated, your primary care doctor may have to step in and treat you for something called hypothyroidism. Specifically, adrenal fatigue causes a unique form of this syndrome called secondary hypothyroidism. Your thyroid and your adrenal glands work very closely with one another. And if your adrenals stop working, there's a very good chance you're thyroid will follow suit. As if adrenal fatigue weren't bad enough on its own, when both those glands and your thyroid start to shut down, the symptoms of both conditions compound one another.

Stop Eating Before Bed - Do This Instead!

Before we go any further, we want to make one thing abundantly clear: we're not telling you all of this information to scare you into behaving one way or another. Our purpose here is to give you the facts you need to make healthful changes that will have a positive impact on your life. Stretching out the time between your last meal of the day and your first Z's of the night is a relatively simple yet powerful step in the right direction. But there's even more you can do on top of that.

We know that getting a good night's sleep is one of the hardest struggles people face in modern society today. Going to bed on an empty stomach can make it that much more difficult. But if you start taking an herbal sleep aid - like Avinol PM - To help you get to sleep at night, you'll be doing yourself a favor in more ways than one. For starters, Avinol PM contains melatonin, and melatonin has an adversarial relationship with cortisol. The more melatonin you have in your system, the more cortisol gets flushed out of your bloodstream, which can help drastically reduce chronic inflammation. Furthermore, the natural Botanical compounds, flavanols, and extracts in the Avinol PM formula have a variety of anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects on every single cell in your body. Lastly, taking a dose of Avinol PM right before bed with a full 8 oz of water could put just enough in your belly to keep a growling stomach from making you stay awake. It's an affordable solution to what could one day become a very serious problem if you're not careful.