Dr. Kristen Holmes explains why eating close to bedtime sabotages sleep. Digestion and deep sleep both tap the same nervous system branch, so late meals bias your body toward digestion and away from restorative sleep. She recommends a time buffer between your last calorie and bed to improve sleep quality and metabolic recovery.
Humans are not meant to be feeding over the course of 15, 16 hours. The average American is eating their calories over the course of 15 hours. And what happens is you end up eating really close to bed. And digestion is a parasympathetic activity. We know that there's two branches to the autonomic nervous system, which HRV is a measure of, and you've got your parasympathetic and sympathetic. They're both competing to send signals to the heart. When you are trying to digest, you're activating the rest and digest, the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. When you are sleeping, you're also trying to engage the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. You're asking your system to digest food, metabolize food, it's gonna bias toward that. It's gonna prioritize digestion at the expense of getting into these deeper stages of sleep. So creating a buffer between your last calorie and when you intend to sleep is also an amazing strategy. And for folks who are struggling with your metabolic health, might be a path to help improve markers of metabolic health. There are lots of external data to suggest that, and we certainly see in our data, big heavy meals just prior to bed do impair markers of recovery.
She Used to Crash Every Afternoon — Here's What Fixed It | The Wardrobe Consultant
