Routine……Earlier, lighter dinner and its relationship to Sleep
The What:
We all crave a good nights sleep, to wake feeling energized and light, maintaining that energy through-tout the day. The last post covered tools and theories that help facilitate a good nights sleep. Focusing on routine, it’s worth looking at what we do throughout the day that may affect the quality of our sleep. This includes meals times.
The How:
Incrementally shift your last meal of the day to 6-7pm or at least 3 hours before bed to help with a deeper longer sleep. Choose simpler, lighter meals that are easy to digest.
The Why:
According to Ayurveda, the rule of thumb is that our digestive fire isn’t strong at night. Our human body doesn’t produce much bile in the evening to burn through heavy meals, fat or protein. Many of us eat after 6 pm in Kapha time when digestion starts to get very weak and energy is moving down. When we eat late, we put a load on our body that detracts from a more efficient body. If you don’t eat late, but you eat too heavy at night, the same thing is true.
Some science: Two of the primary hormones that affect sleep are melatonin and cortisol. In the evening, Melatonin levels rise, preparing the body for sleep. Dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO) usually begins around 8pm. It takes 2.5-3hrs on average for our stomach to empty and pass food to the small intestine. So work the clock back and you’re at 5-6pm.
During a normal sleep cycle, melatonin levels tend to peak between 1am-4am . The body begins to replace melatonin with cortisol. A boost of cortisol is what helps you jump out of bed and start your day.
The role of Blood sugar: We’ve ascertained we need melatonin for sleep.
If blood sugar crashes in the middle of the night, cortisol (your wake and stress hormone) levels rise, and melatonin production diminishes causing you to sleep lighter or wake.
If you eat and haven’t fully digested food before sleeping, this may initially raise your blood sugar. (especially when eating carbohydrate rich foods). Blood sugar is then more likely to experience a crash while asleep
· Blood sugar spikes.
· The pancreas releases insulin to remove the sugar from the blood and into your cells.
· If the blood sugar spike happens frequently (as it does for many), the pancreas delivers too much insulin into the bloodstream.
· This causes a drastic drop in blood sugar, or a crash.
· A blood sugar crash alerts your adrenals glands that there is an emergency.
· The adrenals secrete the stress hormone cortisol therefore diminishing melatonin
More How:
So how to we change this through routine? A few suggestions: These are not rigid so use these as template, try and see what works for you.
Dinner needs to be easy to digest Lighter, Simple and balanced. The later you eat, the lighter it needs to be
Plan and schedule: If you don’t plan ahead, making the changes required will seem a slog.
Schedule: an earlier dinner in to the day and your meal planning and prep time
Try shifting your evening mealtime back to earlier in the evening. Don’t try to change your mealtime by 3 hours, Go gradual. Try setting meal times back 30 minutes, until it ends up around 6 pm most nights. Having an exception here and there is OK. But, aim for the cut off to be consistent at least 5 x a week.
You may find you have to shift around other activities in your day. However, Going to bed earlier (see previous blog) means you’re able to rise earlier (coming soon) and therefore you’ll have time in the morning to do those things.
Meal plan and make a shopping list at the same time. This also helps with unnecessary food waste, inspiration on what to cook and helps reduce unhealthy food choices and cravings when you’re hungry. Dinner used to be called supper... meaning a “little supplement.” Lunch and breakfast should be your larger meals. Lunch higher in fats, proteins and healthy carbs.
Prepping and freezing meals. This one might seem tough but preparing food is easy when you have planned ahead.
Contact us is you’d like to learn more