10 Foods to Avoid Before Sleep

You may be craving those late night munchies before bedtime. After all, we all love the comfort of food. There’s nothing wrong with eating before you go to sleep as long as you eat the right kinds of meals like lean based proteins with little fat or carbohydrates. Some of the foods that should be avoided are often times the ones we just can’t resist. If you want to keep the weight off and wake up feeling refreshed, ditch the following 10 foods when it comes to your late night eating habits:

 

Ice Cream: Ice Cream is loaded with fat, and most of them have the bad kind of fat, called trans fats. Trans fats are something you want to avoid at all costs. Second, ice cream is loaded with sugar, so you’re going to have a boost of energy before you sleep, which is pointless. When trying to stay lean, sugar is something that should be completely eliminated from your diet, especially before sleep when you’re not using that sugar for physical activity. Research has also found that eating high-sugar foods before bed can cause nightmares.

 

Celery: Surprised, huh? Celery is a very nutritious food that should be eaten at all times of the day besides when you need to sleep. Why? Celery is a natural diuretic, which means it may make you go to the bathroom more than usual since more water is being pushed through your body. Use sleep for its purpose: reparation. That means uninterrupted sleep will always be the best form of reparation. Getting up to go to the bathroom disturbs the normal sleep cycles you go through.

 

Pasta: Pasta can fill you up quicker than most foods because of all the carbohydrates you are consuming. Carbohydrates are a great form of energy, but you don’t want fast acting energy that turns to sugar rather quickly just before you are about to hit the sack. You want to keep your body in a fat-burning pace while sleeping, which means you should mainly stick to proteins and possibly some healthy fats. Heavy carbohydrate meals should be avoided before bed since this can result in adipose spillover once glycogen levels are topped off, and it disrupts your blood sugar levels, which makes it more difficult to fall asleep or be kept asleep.

 

French Fries: Besides being loaded with carbohydrates and fat, fried foods are the single most recognized cause of acid reflux and most often associated with heartburn. This can wake you up periodically throughout the night and be a real pain to deal with.

 

Hamburger: Not only do you get those high glycemic carbohydrates from the bun, but the burger itself can cause a range of problems when it comes to your sleep. Even though red meat can help you sleep due to its high levels of iron and typtophan, it is loaded with fat and can be very hard to digest. Not to mention, you’re probably adding a few condiments on your burger which certainly don’t help your waistline.

 

Cereal: Cereal contains a high amount of sugar and is full of carbohydrates. Again, stay away from the big meals of high glycemic carbohydrates.

 

Dark Chocolate: Dark chocolate has caffeine in it and it’s loaded with stimulants like theobromine, which can make your heart race and keep you awake during the night. You want your heart to slow down to fall asleep.

 

Alcohol: Alcohol makes you drowsy at first, but then you will wake up a few hours after. It will make you wake up feeling far from refreshed because alcohol disrupts sleep cycles, disrupting the balance of REM sleep and non-REM sleep. This can prevent you from reaching the deeper, more restorative phases of sleep, leaving you more groggy and tired in the morning.

 

Fast Food: Greasy, heavy, fatty foods will make you feel sluggish the next morning when you wake up. Big meals also make your stomach work in overdrive to digest all that food.

 

Anything Spicy: If you like spicy foods like tabasco sauce or even mustard, think again. Besides being linked to heartburn and indigestion, spicy foods elevate the body temperatures during your first sleep cycle, which can disrupt sleep patterns.

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