If you can’t help yourself from visiting your refrigerator and you can’t stop eating late at night before you go to sleep, you have your species to thank! Yes, as a human being, your Circadian system is causing you to naturally listen to your body’s internal clock, which is why you get those hunger pangs and crave that late-night food in the form of sweets or the salty kind to go along with your favorite evening comedy show.
Even if you are one of those people who eat small and balanced meals throughout the day, your body may still tell you it’s hungry and interfere with your ability to get a restful night’s sleep when the late evening arrives.
In a recent study, scientists closed off the world to a bunch of participants and denied them access to any type of device that could tell them what time it was. They even placed them in an area with no curtains and no contact with anyone except the scientists studying them. There was no way for these people to determine after a few days what time of the day it was!
The study showed all participants would get hunger pangs during the late night even though these subjects didn’t know the actual time or day of the week! Pretty interesting stuff!
This means it’s completely natural for all of us to crave those late night snacks because we have no choice in the matter. For many folks, there are many nights when they cannot sleep because they are so hungry at around 11:00 PM. and this causes them to go to the kitchen and grab something to make their stomachs stop sending those nasty hungry signals to their brains.
One of the biggest problems with most people who are a little overweight is they tend to stay up a too late while trying to get things done and if they don’t fall asleep at a certain time, they may be setting themselves up for failure around their waistlines!
The challenge is to not be a victim to your body’s natural time clock by learning how to control your hunger and you can do this by:
1. Getting a good night’s sleep as often as possible and making sure you don’t regularly stay up late.
2. Not having to rely on caffeine to get yourself through the day.
3. Not skipping breakfast because this is the time when you are least hungry and you don’t have a tendency to overeat.
4. Eating something light if you absolutely need to in order to stop hunger pangs. For late night munchies, drink an eight ounce glass of skim or low-fat milk instead of a fattening or high carb snack.
