Healthy Living: Foods You Should Avoid Before Bed If You Want to Lose Weight

 Loading up on certain pre-bedtime snacks can make you toss and turn, set you up for overeating the next day, and dial down your fat-burning hormones. 

Crappy sleep reduces your body’s insulin sensitivity and levels of the muscle-building human growth hormone while upping your levels of the stress hormone cortisol, according to 2015 research published in Diabetologia.

While you don't have to give up bedtime snacks entirely (we recommend these snacks for weight
loss instead), just avoid these five to reach your goals faster. 

1.    Dark Chocolate: It seems like a healthy way to satisfy your sweet tooth before you crash, but this late-night snack is exactly what you don’t want before bed: caffeine, theobromine (another stimulant), and sugar. And while the first two can make it more difficult to drift off after eating, the last one can directly sabotage your weight loss efforts.

“Sleeping on a surge of quick-acting sugar is the perfect environment for fat storage,” says registered dietitian Betsy Opyt, R.D.
While your system will utilize some of the sugar to maintain your body during rest, a lot of it will be stored as fat since you're not active when you're sleeping.

2.    Coconut oil and Goat Cheese: Don’t get us wrong, fat isn’t exactly evil. Foods high in saturated fat can be satiating and help boost your weight loss progress, but when you down them right before bed they can interfere with your sleep.

That’s because saturated fat can cause the valve that separates the bottom end of your esophagus and your stomach, or the lower esophageal sphincter, to relax. Since fat takes a long time to digest, whatever you ate has extra time to try to sneak back into your esophagus and wake you up, says Jim White, R.D.N., owner of Jim White Fitness Studios.

3. Spicy Foods: Even if you're dipping celery into it, eating salsa or any food with a kick within an hour of going to bed is just asking for heartburn and bad sleep, Opyt says. Like fatty foods, spicy foods can cause your lower esophageal sphincter to relax. That allows any acids brewing in your belly to come on up—which is made especially easy when you’re lying down in bed and don’t have gravity keeping things put. 

4. Red Wine: So, we've also heard some health experts say that a glass of red wine before bed can be good for you, but that's not exactly true. As much as we love antioxidant-packed vino, alcohol is not an advisable nightcap. Sure, you’ll conk out come bedtime, but you’ll struggle to get into the deep, restorative stages of sleep, says White.  
For each glass of alcohol you down, wait about an hour before turning in.

5. Brownies and Cookies: are hardest to resist right before you hit the sack, but when you're trying to get in shape they're best saved for daylight hours.
Sugar works in your body as fuel, says White. Add more in right before you go to sleep, when your body’s reserves of stored carbs are already topped off, and that sugar will likely wind up stored as fat.