Why I Stopped Eating 3 Hours Before Bed (It’s Not What You Think)

Discover why you should stop eating before bed for better sleep, digestion, blood sugar, and gut health. Stop eating 3 hours before bed to maximize these benefits.

I’m going to share with you why I stopped eating 3 hours before bed, and it’s not the reason why you might think. Every single time you go to sleep at night, the first 90 minutes after you fall asleep, your body fires off the single biggest hormonal event of the entire day. And a snack before bed can shut down that event by 78%. And so, we’re really talking about a hormone called growth hormone. Growth hormone mostly spikes in that first 90 minutes in the deep delta wave sleep.

So, in your brain, you have this little gland called the pituitary that actually releases this growth hormone. It actually has everything to do with when you go to sleep. So, if you go to sleep at midnight, now we’re talking 90 minutes after that period of time. And this is why the old advice of don’t eat after 8:00 p. m.

or don’t eat after 6:00 p. m. , that’s wrong because the clock isn’t the trigger, it’s the sleep that’s the trigger. I go to bed at 10:00. My wife goes to bed at 9:00.

So, what I’m going to talk about really has to do with when you go to bed. And so, it’s really important not to eat anything sugary 3 hours before that period of time. I am the poster child for snacking late at night. In fact, after dinner, I would eat constantly right after I was done until I went to bed every single night. In fact, I used to work at a theater and I would come home at night with a garbage bag filled with salty popcorn for my father and I to consume.

And when I mention sugar, really I’m talking about the hormone that sugar activates because it boils down to this one hormone which I talk about in a lot of videos, insulin. Insulin is the hormone that severely stresses and suppresses growth hormone. Growth hormone is the hormone that causes you to burn fat, but not just burn fat, also build muscle. It also helps you repair skin and collagen, which actually makes up all your connective tissue. Also, growth hormone helps bone growth.

And growth hormone is intimately involved in recovery, especially after exercise. So, growth hormone is not just about burning fat, it’s one of the many things it can help you do it. At night, when we’re sleeping, is when we do most of the building and repair of the body, okay? In fact, when you exercise today, you’re basically breaking down muscles, you’re adding more stress. All of the benefit from that workout is going to occur at night.

If you’re sleeping, if you don’t have too much of an insulin spike. If you want the best beauty sleep, you want to avoid anything that suppresses growth hormone, aka insulin. The other interesting thing about growth hormone is it goes into your immune system, as well as your neurons. In fact, has brain damage, growth hormone is there to help build up gray matter. Now, I know some of you are sitting there going, “Wow, I’m depressed because I normally snack at night, and that means I can’t ever eat after a dinner.

” Well, what the research really shows is it really has to do with insulin, okay? I’m not saying you can’t eat anything, but anything that triggers insulin is going to blunt growth hormone, okay? There are foods that don’t trigger insulin. Protein doesn’t trigger insulin that much. Vegetables don’t too much.

In fact, most of the insulin occurs when you’re consuming sugary meals and starches. Now, if we’re talking about growth hormone, we also have to talk about deep sleep. We need deep sleep to help us wake up feeling refreshed. If you’re not getting the deep sleep, you’re going to wake up feeling kind of groggy. It’ll start affecting your cognitive function.

You’ll start craving the wrong food. So, just getting deep sleep is very vital, but insulin can affect the deep delta wave sleep. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank. Pollute the water and the fish gets sick.

You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel, but there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest. And until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. I built a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you.

It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Now, on the flip side, if you do a day of fasting for like 24 hours, guess what happens to growth hormone when you go to sleep at night? It has the potential to go up 5x. That’s right.

You can really spike insulin just by doing fasting. Now, are there other ways that we can also enhance growth hormone? Yes. High-intensity interval training. When you lift weights or you work out, where you’re activating your muscles, the higher the intensity, the more the growth hormone spike.

And this is why, probably out of all the exercises, the explosive sprinting or plyometric type exercises are best for growth hormone. We’ve already talked about low insulin keeping growth hormone working normally, but also prolonged fasting. If you fasted for 5 days, you actually double the pulse frequency of this one spike. So, you get two spikes by doing a 5-day fast. There’s another little piece of the puzzle.

It’s called melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone that’s activated by darkness that helps you go to sleep. But, that hormone doesn’t just tell you to go to sleep. It also helps the pancreas release less insulin. And so, melatonin is also involved with insulin.

So, if you’re eating late, that insulin is also going to affect your melatonin. So, you may find it’s hard to go to sleep if you’re eating this sugary meal. Don’t worry, it gets worse. No, it doesn’t get worse. It’s going to get better.

I need to mention how common snacking is, okay? It’s not just you that might love to snack. 60% of adults snack at 8:00 p. m. 44% of people actually are eating in bed, okay, at night when they’re in front of the TV.

58% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 snack on a regular basis. Harvard did a study that said people are hardwired to get hungry at 8:00 p. m. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything about it. This is what I recommend.

Let’s say you’re done eating at 7:00. I would highly suggest you get a little sign with magnets and you put it on your refrigerator, the kitchen is closed. A lot of people, when they’re craving salty crunchy, really just need more salt. And in the past, I tended not to consume a lot of salt in the mid part of the day. I would want it towards the end of the day.

So, I would preload your body with more salt. An average person needs almost a teaspoon of salt a day of sea salt. And I would start putting that on the first meal of the day, and also mix it in with your electrolyte powder if you’re going to do that as well in the early part of the day so you can preload that sodium. If you are low in sodium, you’re going to crave salty snack foods. If you try to go to bed with low sodium, you will have more of a difficult time going to sleep because sodium helps reduce cortisol that helps you drift off into a better sleep.

In fact, if you are a salt craver, just try this. Instead of eating something salty and crunchy, just consume a little salt with a little bit of water in the evening before you go to bed or even just put it in your mouth and drink a little water. My body sleeps so much better with salt than going to bed when I’m craving salt. And if there’s any consideration about blood pressure, what that’s all about is you’re also low in potassium. So, you can get a high potassium electrolyte powder, increase that during the day, not before bed cuz it’s going to push out fluid, and th