I've had a question for a long time, and never found a specific answer.

When you are asleep, your body releases hormones which cause your energy needs to be met by accessing stored energy in your adipose tissue.

Does anyone know how this process is affected by having a meal near bed time? In other words, lets say you eat a big meal at 10 PM, and then go to sleep half an hour later. Will the hormones still be released? Or, are your energy needs met partially or entirely by the food you are digesting?

I've tried to find scientific articles to answer this. I would expect that this has been studied. Here is one article from 2002 which says that digestion slows down when you sleep. To me, that would imply that your body may be, at least in part, accessing stored energy, but that's just a guess.

Digestion might slow down while you sleep--but probably metabolism in general will slow down as well--so that might be a wash. There are a lot of studies on meal timing. Some suggest that taking most of your food in earlier in the day will increase weight loss--but some others suggest that taking calories in later in the day will be better for lean mass. The caloriesproper blog by Bill Lagakos goes into the argument for early feeding quite a bit.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, personally. Suppose you ate all your calories just before bed. Assuming that doesn't disturb your sleep, it seems likely that you'd get little energy from your fat cells while you were absorbing that meal. Growth hormone is released in response to fasting--no decrease in that exogenous fuel source, no need for an increase in growth hormone.

But then if you didn't eat again until the same time the next day, at some point, the nutrients from the food you ate at that meal will have been completely digested and either burned for fuel or stored. At that point, it's no different from the rest of your fuel stores. At some point, you'll have fasted long enough that there'll be an increase in growth hormone and other fasting hormones--pretty much the same thing that would have happened sometime during the night if you'd gone to bed in more of a fasted state. At some point in the day, you'll eat, and growth hormone etc. will be decreased. At some point, you'll be fasted, and these will be increased. It's really not certain whether it's best that this happen when you're sleeping or sometime in the middle of the day.

The ketogenic diet itself causes a shift in circadian rhythm, making it uncertain that a particular pattern of meal timing would even have the same effect as it would on a higher carb diet. A lot of the circadian pattern of hormone secretion relates to the task of maintaining somewhat stable blood glucose and fuel supply to the brain and other organs, and obviously this task changes quite a bit on a ketogenic diet.

Thanks for your response, however there is much that I did not follow.

My impression is, and maybe you know otherwise, that energy needs which arise during the day are fulfilled by eating, and energy needs over night are fulfilled by accessing stored energy.

I therefore would imagine that any interference with the process of burning energy over night (such as habitually going short on sleep) would cause a person to start putting on pounds.

As for GH being released in response to fasting, I don't plan on doing any fasting, but I'd be curious to know how quickly it appears.

Day or night, energy needs are provided by accessing stored energy.

Unless you've eaten fairly recently. In that case, they may mainly come from nutrient absorption from the gut.

The main thing that's special about the night, when you're asleep, is that in most cases, people aren't eating while they're asleep. This puts them in a fasted state--so they'll dip into their fat and glycogen stores for energy.

Going short on sleep wouldn't just reduce time slept--but also tend to leave you lethargic during the day. I also find that if I'm tired, I'm more likely to make looser food decisions--whatever diet I'm trying to stick to, I won't follow it quite as rigorously. I'm sort of doubtful that six hours sleeping vs. eight hours sleeping means two hours less dipping into body fat stores is accurate--if this is the sort of idea that you're talking about. If I wake up two hours earlier than usual, and then eat at the usual time, I'll still have to be dipping into my body's internal energy stores for those extra two waking hours. If I woke up and immediately had breakfast, that might be a different thing.

Teaser has good answers on your question, I'm clueless. But you also asked where you might search for more info and I would suggest anything by Dr Dominic D'Agostino, who researches ketones related to optimizing Navy Seal performance, ability to go without sleep, long dives, etc.

He has answered so many detailed questions in his interviews with Tim Ferris and RHonda Patrick. He did a great show with Ferris in Nov 2015 (linked here http://ketonutrition.blogspot.com/2...s-lectures.html) and just recently a follow-up show where he answered more listener questions, two hours of only Dom reading questions and answering. I can't remember if your specific question was addressed, and if there transcripts by all means read them rather than listen , but episode #172 is good too.

You might find some useful information in this previous thread on the same/similar subject .. Burning Calories Over Night - Question!

I don't do it often but I know I remember reading somewhere in DANDR where he said to eat a little something before bedtime. My dog chewed up my good highlighted copy and I'm using a virgin unmarked book, so I can't find where I read it.
A lot of people would disagree but if I find it I'll post the quote and page number.

I think I like my answer in the previous thread Doreen linked to better.

Ketoneman said (in that other thread):



I remember Taubes saying something about it being normal to be in a positive energy balance during the day, when we eat, and in a negative energy balance at night when we sleep (and, usually, don't eat).


Here's a quote from GCBC (from the free sample portion on googlebooks);



https://books.google.ca/books?id=Xd...20sleep&f=false

It's not just about calories burned during sleep--because, of course, it's always possible to eat enough food to compensate during the waking hours. During the sleeping hours, of course there is that negative balance--again, because you're sleeping, not eating. This bit;



is perhaps true not only during the fast, since a ketogenic diet is designed to come as close to an approximation of the fasted metabolism as you can come while still eating food. So added to the usual negative energy balance during the night, you have a decreased positive energy balance during the day--hopefully resulting in an overall net negative energy balance for the 24 hour period.

doreen T - LOL. Let's do this again in a year and 5 months!

Meme#1 - I don't meant to be critical, but your dog eats too many carbs.

teaser - I'll be combing over what you say, plus I've done some reading on GH. I was completely unaware that it was even released during the day. This quote from a sourced article is a little discouraging however:

Oh good, We need some humor around here

I told my Dad about Meme's dog eating her homework. He says when he got a puppy when he was a kid, he took a book on dog training out of the library. The dog chewed the heck out of the book. The librarian just laughed when he went to return it, didn't bother fining him or anything.

Ketoneman--I'm not sure why you find that article discouraging, at least to the topic of this thread. The question of whether a low carb meal should be had just before going to bed is separate from the question of whether people on higher carb diets should eat carbohydrates just before going to bed.



Here the delay is due to a bout of resistance training sometime in the afternoon, but he suggests that this might be what happens if you eat some carbs before bed. A delay in secretion of growth hormone, perhaps with a decrease in the peak, but normal levels by the end of the night. I don't know that you can rule out an importance to that delayed peak. But at any rate--going back to the original topic of this thread, that delay might not matter to protein synthesis etc., I don't know, but if it's caused by carbohydrate consumption as opposed to exercise, you certainly would have a situation where early in the night you'd be getting more calories from the gut than from endogenous sources. And I'm not sure what the difference in growth hormone would be eating ketogenically, but you'd also be getting more calories more directly from dietary sources during absorption vs. going to bed fasted. That's a given, whatever might be going on with the exact pattern of growth hormone secretion.

Theories about what might be going on with insulin or growth hormone may be interesting, and may give us insights as to why a particular diet, or intermittent fasting or meal timing might work--but ultimately the question is whether these approaches do work, if people follow them. That caloriesincontext blog has this to say;



It's not a profound thing that's been said here, although it is a truism, if you throw in a few more words that I think are probably assumed here. This could be reduced to something along the lines of

It's a reduction in net calorie intake (calories eaten less calories lost to the system, whether burned for energy, malabsorbed, excreted, etc) that is the final arbiter of how many pounds you lose.

Even here "how many pounds you lose" should say "how many calories you lose," since water etc. can contribute quite a bit to weight loss and contains no metabolizable energy.

The "or what have you" included in the parentheses is a concession, if one that's supposed to be shrugged off. I personally would fill that in with



And throw in the possibility that in free living subjects, at a given calorie intake, overweight individuals might find not only that they are less hungry while eating low carb, but also more energetic. Kevin Hall has a recent study that throws that into question--but admits in the paper about that study that the controlled nature of the study and the clamped exercise could possibly mask a tendency for people on a ketogenic diet to be more prone to spontaneous activity in a more natural setting.

In my personal experience--making the single assumption that "carbohydrates promote insulin which promotes fat storage" hasn't gotten me ripped, no eight percent body fat here. It did however stop the development of obesity in its tracks, and where I used to have to fight to be merely overweight instead of slightly obese, now I get to fight to be lean instead of overweight, I've been consistently twenty pounds lighter since then.

When I went with calorie restriction as my main approach to weight maintenance, I failed miserably. And now--when I add calorie restriction to low carb, it's certainly successful for weight loss, which it always has been for me--but as far as keeping me consistently below what seems to be a new low carb set point about twenty pounds lower than my higher carb set point--again I fail, but not so miserably, because failure means that I sometimes hit 170 pounds, rather than 190 (and counting).

Back to that blogger;



Number two... okay, why not. But number one--in my experience, and I'm not alone in this, the most successful approach to "caloric deficit" I've experienced came through putting "too much emphasis" on food choices. Even when I'm calorie restricting--maybe especially when I'm intentionally calorie restricting. I might be able to temporarily satisfy myself with as little as 1600 calories, if it's mostly egg, lean steak, salmon, that sort of thing. If it's pork rinds, sour cream and cheese--perfectly good low carb foods--then it's a no go. And 1600 calories of pizza and ice cream? Don't make me laugh.