There’s a big myth about eating before bedtime. It seems like whatever health expert or sleep expert you listen to, they all have a different opinion.

Should you eat food before bed?

Or should you avoid food before bed?

That’s the age old question I’d like to talk about in this article.

My goal is to give you a little information about both opinions, then share what I do.

From that my goal is to give you some ideas to play with that might improve your sleep.

I think it’s extremely important to test things ourselves rather than relying on some article on the internet to tell us what to do.

I don’t necessarily know what the “myth” is about eating before bedtime but I’ll try to demystify it to the best of my ability.

One of the “myths” is that if you eat before bed, you’ll put on weight. Another “myth” is that if you eat before bed it’ll cause you to sleep poorly.

Mainstream Advice About Eating Before Bed

Positive Effects

Eating before bedtime can regulate your nervous system by stabilizing blood sugar levels and giving you a feeling of satiation. Some say it can help prevent extra calories from being stored as fat. Some studies have showing that it may help with weight loss….depending on what your bedtime snack actually is. This extra bit of food can help your liver throughout the night. This can prevent the release of free fatty acids, which can block the ability to use glucose and create a brain-toxic situation.

Negative Effects

On the flip side eating before bed can make it harder to fall asleep, trigger heartburn, and lead to overeating. It can also cause indigestion, acid reflux, and other sleep disturbances.

So who do you believe? The only way to know is to try not eating before bed and see how you feel. Then try eating a somewhat large snack before bed and see how you feel. Generally when I do these tests I try them for 7 days in a row just to really feel what it’s doing to me.

Then you could try eating a very small bedtime snack including targeted supplements (which I go into below) and see how that makes you feel.

My Approach To Eating Before Bed

I follow a circadian based lifestyle. This means I’m highly in tune with the environment I live in. I connect with nature at the right time (watching the sunrise) and up to ten times per day I’m getting outdoors after sunrise before sunset. Side note: I love those movies. 🙂

This means if I’m inside, I’m always wearing my yellow blue blockers (I like Hudson) if looking at my phone. If I’m on the computer I’m wearing my blue blockers but also using Iris Tech.

I always open windows and get natural light into my room.

Every 45 minutes to an hour I’m going outside and grounding to the earth with no sunglasses on and no shoes on.

Basically I’m outside as much as I can be and when I’m inside, I’m trying to mimic nature as much as possible while also mitigating technology at the same time.

What works best for me is not eating anything after the sun has set. This is laid in detail the books Yes, No Maybe, Chronobiotic Nutrition as well as The Daylight Diet.

Two books I highly recommend reading.

What they argue in these books is that because we are beings of light and the food we eat is also light. In fact the food we eat is essentially light. Food is photons of light frequency that have been slowed down by matter.

Here’s a really interesting quote from Dr. Fritz Albert-Popp about how man is a being of light. I thought it was really interesting…

“We know today that man, essentially, is a being of light. And the modern science of photobiology … is presently proving this. In terms of healing, the implications are immense. We now know, for example, that quanta of light can initiate, or arrest, cascade-like reactions in the cells, and that genetic cellular damage can be virtually repaired, within hours, by faint beams of light. We are still on the threshold of fully understanding the complex relationship between light and life, but we can now say emphatically, that the function of our entire metabolism in dependent on light.”

I ask you….how much light is in the food you’re eating?

Processed foods contain no light.

Whether or not you eat before bed, I would encourage you to eat a diet that contains light. That could be animal tissue or plant tissue. But if it’s processed in a lab, it’s going to be devoid of light.

I’ve mentioned before that we have photoreceptors in our digestive tract. This means that for some reason, we have receptor cells in our gut that need to receive light. Since all we put into our gut is food, I can only extrapolate that the food we eat should contain light.

Why does the gut need to receive light from our food?

My research tells me that it needs to know where that food came from and align our circadian rhythm to that food. These photoreceptor cells are in constant communication with the master clock inside our body called the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus of our brain.

The book Yes, No Maybe argues that all natural food should be consumed at particular times of the day. The reason is that the food we eat contains information from your environment.

Food is information?

Of course it is. Why else would you be eating it?

What information is it giving to those photoreceptors cells in your gut?

Think of it like a lock and key situation.

The key is the food you eat and the lock is your gut.

The key in this case captures photonic energy from the sun and delivers it to the bacteria in your gut.

Here’s a short breakdown of what foods should be consumed at what time…

1. Morning Foods: These are foods that are highest above the ground (like fruit trees for example) that receive the first rays of the sun.
2. Afternoon Foods: These would be foods that are less high off the ground like animals, bushes (berries etc).
3. Nighttime Foods: These are foods that are under the ground (root vegetables etc) or under the surface of the earth (fish or anything in the ocean)

In the book he goes into detail about how the angle of the light along with the spectrum frequency and wavelength hitting the foods matters.

The idea is to eat food at the right time and in the right order. If you follow this for 30 days you’ll notice a difference in many aspects of your life.

The Daylight Diet on the other hand argues that we should only eat food when the sun is up. That makes sense to me and it allows my body to take a break from food for many hours.

During the Winter in Southern California the sun sets around 4:45pm on Dec 22nd.

This means we might eat dinner around 5pm (technically breaking this rule but when you have twins there’s a little give and take). I will not eat again until the next day at around 7:30 or 8am.

This gives my body at least 12 to 14 hours of intermittent fasting. This allows me to rest and digest activating my parasympathetic nervous system while I sleep.

I wasn’t always eating this way. For a long time I would have a nighttime snack before bed.

I always noticed that I didn’t sleep as deep and I would wake up 2 or 3 times during the night. I would also notice it took me longer to fall asleep.

Going to bed on an empty stomach has been really helpful in improving my sleep scores.

I try different approaches to eating before bedtime. I make a note of what works and what doesn’t.

Here are a couple of other foods to consider as a bed time snack.

• Magnesium-Rich Foods: These can help relax your muscles and improve sleep quality. Almonds or a small amount of dark chocolate (85% cocoa or higher) can be beneficial.
• Tryptophan-Rich Foods: This amino acid is a precursor to serotonin and melatonin. Turkey, chicken, dark cherries, and cottage cheese are good options.

What I do now is I take a few supplements before bed along with some some salty coconut water and honey.

Here’s my bedtime eating routine…

1. Pour 1 ounce of filtered water into my shot glass. To this water or (coconut water) I’ll add about 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt and 3 drops of iodine.
2. With this salty water I’ll take 3 capsules of a systemic enzyme called Dissolve It All. It’s a proteolytic enzyme that lowers inflammation when I sleep and eats ups scar tissue.
3. I’ll also take 50 mg of melatonin. If you’ve tried melatonin and it hasn’t worked, read this.
4. After that I’ll take 1 heaping teaspoon of raw organic honey.
5. Brush my teeth, take a shower, do my stretches, read and go to bed (all under red lights of course).

Iodine

The iodine helps regulate my thyroid gland and optimize my hormones when I sleep. It also activates the part of my immune system that will be fighting off infections while I sleep.

Honey

The idea behind the honey is that it contains calories that can help you feel satiated. It contains sugar that will help you maintain glucose levels throughout the night. This will spare your liver and prevent waking up in the middle of the night due to insulin drops. It’s also rich in enzymes (if it’s raw) and it is an incredible medicine too. It has high levels of ormus and other monoatomic elements. It’s a natural antibiotic as well as being extremely easy to digest. It’s also a nighttime food according to chronobiotic nutrition principles. Make sure it’s raw and organic. It would be preferable if it’s local and in season too.

Salty Water

The idea behind the salty water (or coconut water) is to regulate my electrolytes before bed and give me a good sodium potassium ratio to balance minerals needed for both nREM sleep (including deep sleep) and REM sleep.

Proteolytic Enzymes

This helps do dissolve scar tissue in my body as well as eat up any debris (like pathogens, fibrin, fibrinogen, toxins etc) that should not be there. Since sleep is a time of restoration and regeneration, taking these enzymes has really helped upregulate that biological process. I wake up feeling amazing.

Melatonin

I generally take melatonin 3 hours before bed and about 30 minutes before bed. This helps to regulate my circadian rhythm and activating all the timing mechanisms in my suprachiasmatic nucleus. Melatonin is not a sleeping pill but a powerful antioxidant and a regulator or our internal biological diurnal rhythms.

If you take it exogenously, make sure you’re also doing all the right things to make it work. Melatonin can definitely be taken wrong. This is when people claim it doesn’t work.

There’s No Eating Before Bedtime Myth…

People are eating before bed and people are not eating before bed so there’s not eating before bedtime myth at all. The real myth is figuring out whether eating late  is something that works for your system.

The only way to know that is to try and track. You can track these things with an Oura Ring or a Whoop Band.

I like my approach because it helps the body feeling like it’s satiated and it’s being fed but it’s not putting a lot of burden on the digestive tract. You’re also getting nutrients (from the raw honey) and medicine too in the form of iodine. I also like that your key electrolytes are balanced before bed with sodium (sea salt) and potassium (coconut water) with little to no digestive energy required.

For me this has worked really well. I’d love to know what worked for you!

Questions:

1. Do you fast before bed? If so, how long? Do you feel good doing it?
2. How do you feel eating a larger snack before bed?
3. Have you tried a small bedtime snack?
4. What about taking supplements before bed?

Comment below.