Nutritionist Alexey Isupov told whether it is worth having dinner after 18:00

24.03.2023 18:17
Updated: 25.03.2023 20:45

Many people believe that you can’t eat after 6:00 pm, otherwise you’ll gain extra weight overnight.

Alexey Isupov, nutritionist of the public organization “Nutritionists of Russia,” told whether it is worth having dinner after 18:00.

I don’t know what criteria they are guided by, but there is only one law by which one can determine: “has gained weight or hasn’t gained weight.”

Law of conservation of energy! If you eat more than you spend during the day, you will gain weight anyway. If you worked out hard today and spent 500 calories more than usual, and your diet remains the same, then here is your "long-awaited minus".

It can’t be any other way, nature hasn’t come up with anything new yet, and man certainly won’t deceive it with his “I’ll stop running to the refrigerator after six in the evening.”

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Photo: Pixabay

Of course, you shouldn't overeat in the evening, and especially at night, as this will seriously disrupt your sleep, which will naturally result in a bad mood, fatigue, drowsiness, hormonal surges, and most likely, due to lack of sleep, overeating the next day.

But, a couple of hours before bed, you should definitely have dinner. First of all, you need to understand that dinner should not be viewed as a single meal.

A nutritionist, for example, will evaluate your entire daily diet: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and in addition to this, all the mobility and activity throughout the day. If you ate a full breakfast, had a good lunch, had a snack for an afternoon snack, and it was all properly balanced, without overeating, then your body will most likely definitely “want” to have dinner.

Then, you will simply deprive him of the necessary intake of all the nutrients. Or maybe the opposite, you ate to the fullest all day, and by the evening you no longer feel like it, and many live like this, and the body sometimes gets used to not eating food in the evening (after 18:00). and you often hear this from people: "and I don't want to eat in the evening", because I ate so many calories that of course I don't want to have dinner.

The biggest problem is that our body is like a “conveyor belt”; it constantly needs to be fed with both energy and amino acids, fatty acids and many other substances, vitamins, and micronutrients.

Our organs also work almost without interruption, secrete some hormones, enzymes, bile and it is impossible to tell them “stop”.

If we stop eating dinner after 6 pm, we can start some not very good processes in the body.

Our liver constantly secretes bile, which accumulates in the gallbladder, and when we eat something fatty (bile will react more to fatty foods), this bile enters the lumen of the small intestine to break down the chyme (a lump of food) and finally digest the latter.

Now the most important thing is that when you and I go to bed, we sleep for 7-8 hours. During this time, bile is concentrated in the gallbladder, and when we go to have breakfast, it comes out of it, and then everything repeats itself again.

If you and I decide after watching everyone's favorite Internet feed of some miracle nutritionist that we should stop having dinner after 6:00 PM, then the gap between the last meal and the first the next morning will become catastrophically huge and will reach 12-14 hours!!! I think you can already imagine what will happen to the bile in the gallbladder.

Over time, sometimes literally in a month or two, you can end up with gallstone disease.

I repeat, every 3-4 hours, our body needs energy and nutrients, and we must eat something anyway, even if it is a small snack in terms of calories, but it will definitely be there.

Of course, you shouldn't overeat at night; during your sleep, your body should process everything you ate in the evening, so that when you wake up in the morning you feel hungry and you can happily prepare yourself a full breakfast, not coffee and a sandwich.

With this system, your next day will also be a success in terms of nutrition and everything will go as usual.

Take care of your health, no one else can take care of it except you, and if you don’t know how to properly create a complete diet, then consult a competent nutritionist.

Author: Valeria Kisternaya Internet resource editor