Here is a Nice Surprise About Fat (Don’t You Deserve One?):
Your body already “knows” how to burn fat naturally while you sleep. This isn’t silly marketing hype, even though marketing hypsters (OK, I made up that term) use it that way. How surprised do you think they’d be to know that they are right on target?
This post offers a little explanation about how nighttime fat burning is supposed to work and how you can make it work better. First off, your peak fat burning period out of every 24 hours is about 9-10 hours after you have dinner … if you don’t snack before bedtime! Some other variables play a role, too. These include when, what, and how much you eat and on the frequency, intensity, and duration of your physical activity.
So why is sleep so important for you on how to burn fat naturally? Actually, sleep itself isn’t the main point. The importance of the time between when you finish dinner and when you have breakfast is the key, which just happens to include a typical night’s sleep.
Mobilizing Belly Fat
Fat cells store fuel that you can use for energy when needed. A few things have to happen before storage fat gets moving. Right after you finish dinner, you are still burning off the food calories that you just ate. If you can avoid eating an evening snack, the calories from your meal will be mostly gone within a few hours, at which time you will start to use up stored carbohydrate, in the form of glycogen, from your liver and muscle tissues. Near the end of digestion, you will start using up fat that is circulating in the blood.
It takes 9-10 hours for your food to be completely digested and your blood fat to be mostly used up. This is golden fat burning time! Your body begins, finally, to mobilize fat from storage and start using it for your metabolism. This fat mobilization period is when your body is supposed to burn fat naturally while you sleep. Doesn’t that sound easy?
Stoking Your Fat Burning Furnace
You really don’t have to do anything at this point except to have breakfast about twelve hours after you had dinner. Ideally, at breakfast your furnace has already been at its fat burning hottest for about 2-3 hours, the period from 9-12 hours after your dinner. That’s really all there is to it for optimizing your metabolism to burn fat naturally while you sleep.
The explanation here of how you burn fat naturally while you sleep leaves out the importance of getting good sleep and otherwise releasing stress at night. These are additional factors that will influence your metabolism. All this means is that you can ensure optimal fat burning by getting good sleep. Good sleep entails several 90-minute periods of alternating between deep and light sleep, over about 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Depending on your health and how well you eat in general, whatever you do to make sure you have about a 12-hour period that includes good sleep between dinner and breakfast will give you your best chance to burn fat naturally every night.
Bedtime Snacks Undermine the Whole Thing
After-dinner snacking, a little bit of ice cream before bed, a midnight snack … all of these will interrupt your prime fat-burning time. Your body simply won’t get to the point of mobilizing stored fat. This is a fact of your normal biochemistry. If you have trouble making it from dinner to breakfast without eating, you either have an underlying health problem or bad habits that you have to overcome, or both. If you want to burn fat naturally, the way your body is meant to do, you must allow it to dip into stored fat for at least a couple of hours every night. This is your simplest, easiest, and best hope for harnessing the power of your own metabolism.
Does How Burn Fat Naturally During Sleep Work for Everyone?
Unfortunately, the answer is that not everyone can benefit from nighttime fat burning as much as they should. Your body has its limits, especially if you have diabetes, hormone imbalance, thyroid deficiency, a poor lifestyle, or are taking a number of prescription drugs. The good news is that most of the things that slow down your fat metabolism are based on poor choices that you can undo. Your body knows how to burn fat naturally while you sleep, so doing whatever you can to be healthy and sleep well will keep you on track to do so.
All the best in natural health,
Dr. D
For the past 2 months I have not been eating after dinner. I have eaten a normal healthy whole grain diet excluding all fast food in my diet plan and have lost weight considerably. I have dropped 27 pounds and I can see the difference just by not eating after dinnertime. Try it…it really works!
Night-time fat burning???
First of all fat is mainly about what you stated: “Fat cells store fuel that you can use for energy when needed”. Why would abundant fat cells randomly start burning off when there isn’t a large amount of energy output/when there isn’t a need for fat to super-burn? Fat cells do not “think” as humans do – that is – they don’t watch endless commercials and repetitive propaganda thrashing fat because fat looks bad and therefor is bad. Fat regulates itself pretty well, and it does so according to the many variables going on in a particular body.
The fat in blood thing is also puzzling. Our stomach are usually quite capable of digesting food to such an extent that there isn’t any unprocessed substances going into our blood system. Fat from out dinner just traveling through our veins? Not quite. Fat settling to our stomach/thighs? That’s like saying that the protein in a steak will settle into our muscles and make us more…muscular. Illogical? Exactly. Triglycerides and neutral fats in our vessels and arteries are another thing, but not something solely related to our foods! There is a plethora of reasons why people have high levels of cholesterol and they don’t necessarily correspond to diet. Not to mention the fact that cholesterol isn’t even linked to being the sole cause of heart disease any more (it might not even be one of the main causes). All those statins and anti-cholesterol drugs, all that wasted money for nothing…well all that money for big pharma, not entirely nothing.
When the body craves a snack, a snack is good. A growling tummy does not care for diet rules and neither should we. Good nutrition is important but feeding a hungry body irrespective of time and rules – is the most natural thing one can do.
Hi, Jann:
The information that I post comes from research on human physiology, so some of your puzzlement can be solved by digging into basic textbooks. What scientists know about metabolism is independent of whether you are puzzled by it. Fat cells are coming under intense study because they are turning out to be very complicated factories for hormones of several kinds (e.g., leptin and estrogen). Thinking about stored fat as merely a source of calories is obsolete. Not too many books are available to explain this to the public. However, a book called “Eat Stop Eat” by Brad Pilon is a good start. “Mastering Leptin” by Byron Richards and Mary Guignon Richards is also a great introduction to our 24-hour metabolic cycle and how it relates to how we use what we eat and what we store.
All the best,
Dr. D
Hi, Marcie:
The first time I heard about the importance of not eating after dinner came from that well-known nutrition doctor – Charles Barkely! Okay, just kidding about his nutrition expertise. Nevertheless, he did discover, through advice from an actual nutritionist, that late snacking was keeping him fat. I just posted a little semi-entertaining note on this topic today. Sir Charles has obviously failed to adhere to his own advice since he retired from professional basketball.
All the best,
Dr. D
Thanks for your write-up. My partner and i have always noticed that the majority of people are desirous to lose weight since they wish to appear slim plus attractive. Nevertheless, they do not generally realize that there are other benefits for losing weight as well. Doctors assert that obese people come across a variety of conditions that can be directly attributed to their own excess weight. Fortunately that people who are overweight in addition to suffering from several diseases are able to reduce the severity of the illnesses by way of losing weight. You’ll be able to see a progressive but marked improvement in health while even a moderate amount of weight loss is achieved.