What’s the issue with the carbs? I’m going to guess …

“You’re not as active at night so you don’t need carbs, and if you do, they’ll be stored as fat.” That’s pretty much how the myth goes, no?

So, let’s stop speculating or repeating what we’ve heard and actually look into this! First, let’s get the sleep part out of the way. I’m going to use:

Freedieting.com

Because their calculator is great, and they have many very useful free calculators.

Okay, so I plug in my stats and the typical amount of sleep I get in a given night (8 hours) and guess

how many calories I burned during sleep?

653 calories! Okay, interesting. I’m going to file that away.

Now, sleep, where we “aren’t active so carbs will be burned as fat” only burngs 653. So let’s take a different scenario – how about during the middle of the day, when we aren’t so scared of carbs (after all, it’s not after the 9pm cut-off, right?) so what do most people do?

Well, let’s take my job as an IT Director before I left to work for myself. In that job, I’d probably spend a good 4 hours typing between meals. So how many calories did I burn during 4 hours typing?

544 calories.

Okay, now … wait a minute here. I’m told I can eat carbs during the day because I’m “active” even though I spent much of that time typing on a desk, and I burn about 544 calories between meals. Then I go to sleep at night, and I’m told to cut carbs because “it’s after dark and you burn less and you’ll store it as fat.” But here I just found out that I’m burning more calories between my last meal and breakfast than I did in those 4 hours of typing?! What gives?

Not trying to give you a hard time at all. The carbs-after-dark thing is a myth. What happens is that John or Jane are eating 1800 calories, and then one of their friends who read something in a fitness magazine trying to sell them a before-bed protein drink or picked up an article that sounded intelligent on the web by someone who read an article .. er, you get the point. Any way, they are eating 1800 calories and someone gives them the sage advice to cut carbs after dark. So instead of having that meal replacement shake that was 350 calories they are now having a protein shake that is 150 calories which only has protein because they don’t want that magical fat storage. Then after a few weeks they drop a pound and think, hey, this carbs-at-dark thing really works. The truth be told, they simply cut calories and created a deficit.

Unfortunately, they also listened to the “expert” who said, “if you don’t have carbs it will force your body to burn fat.” I love that one. We’ll just bypass years of biochemistry and the facts about how the body produces energy and make a blanket statement like “cutting carbs forces your body to burn fat.” In reality, your body is always burning energy from multiple sources. In fact, carbohydrate is required as part of the fat-burning process. Therefore, if you don’t supply carbohydrates, guess what? Your body will make do – we can adapt – and it will take the next best thing it can convert to carbs for the process. That would be protein! So in other words, robbing yourself of carbs after dark is essentially assuring that your body is going to use the protein you take in more for energy and oxidation than muscle -building.

The real kicker is the people who take whey before bed. Whey is one of the fastest absorping proteins and the body has a use-it-or-lose-it mentality – if you are not going to use that protein, guess what? Oxidized. Turned into carbs. Burned for energy or stored as fat.

See Also

Foods That Will Sabotage Fat Loss

Conclusions

To make a short story boring, there is nothing magic about after 9pm or before sleep. There are some old assumptions that have been around for a long time that people pass onto people and so forth and will swear by because it’s all they know, but the reality is that a balance, slow-release meal before bed is optimal. It’s okay to have carbs, you just want ones that release their energy slowly. Most low calorie fruit is perfect for this because it is so low on the glycemic index. It also contains fiber. Adding some healthy fats and then a whole foods protein (whole foods protein release more slowly than shakes/wheys/etc – casein or cottage cheese is probably best) will help the process along.

Enjoy your fruit before bed!