Night Time: Your Diet’s Worst Nemesis (and Stomach’s Best Friend)
So, I’ve finally discovered the culprit behind my recent battle with weight gain: It’s the night.
According to the Eatery iPhone app, which has users from all around the world (over 50 countries) log in the meals they eat throughout the day and rate them on healthiness, everyone around the globe seems to take solace in the dark, cloaked mystery of the night to indulge in the stuff that’s a little more fatty, a little more sweet, and a little less healthy. In fact, as the day progresses, it seems most of us usually go from relatively healthy meals to full-on pig outs.
Massive Health (the company behind the Eatery app) provides this interactive, super-cool map of what people around the world are eating at different hours during the day. While most of the scary, lava red indicators of unhealthy diets are to be found in the US region, I noticed that in the Middle East area there seemed to be a lot more people willing to share their early eating choices (signified by the healthy green clusters) than the ones willing to share their night time meals. That in itself could be an indication as to how much people may not want to reveal the amount of junk they’re stuffing their faces with once the sun sets. Or they could be asleep.
As for me, I can’t deny that, once the night rolls around, my diet does indeed take a considerable dip when it comes to the level of healthiness. And I know quite a bundle of people who share the very same habit as well. Now, I’m not sure if this just a lack of willpower to last an entire day on purely healthy food, or just the fact that the earlier hours present more healthier options than the night time does for most people. I’m sure its a mixture of both.
According to this NPR article, we can’t deduce any certain reasons behind these findings. All we know is that “there is a 1.7 percent overall decrease in healthiness of what’s eaten for every hour of the day that passes after breakfast. That’s as true in Tokyo as it is in San Francisco as it is in São Paulo.”
But, hey, for what it’s worth, at least we can all now bask in the luxury of knowing that we’re not the only ones poking our heads into the refrigerator for a 3 AM ice cream fix. And, I don’t know about any of you, but I find an odd kind of comfort in that knowledge.
All my love!
