It’s common to feel a little off right now, given that it’s getting darker earlier and your sleep schedule might be out of whack. Doctors say that the colder months are a good time to rethink your evening routine including when you go to sleep—and what time you eat dinner.
If you feel like you’re doing just fine or can’t handle any more change in your life right now, that’s fair. But if you can’t shake the feeling that you’re driving the struggle bus, tweaking the timing of your last meal of the day is worth considering. While it won’t magically turn things around, there are a few reasons to think about adjusting that dinnertime. Here’s what doctors shared about the best time to eat dinner.
Why should you reconsider your dinnertime in the winter?
It’s important to get this out of the way upfront: There are no studies that clearly spell out that you should adjust your dinnertime in the winter. “But there is a lot of indirect evidence that points in this direction,” Ashkan Farhadi, MD, a gastroenterologist at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA, tells SELF.
A lot of this comes down to your circadian rhythm, Dr. Farhadi says. This is your body’s internal 24-hour clock, and it influences a lot of different elements of your health, Christopher Winter, MD, a sleep medicine specialist, neurologist, and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It, tells SELF. “Your circadian rhythm and circadian factors influence when you fall asleep and wake up, and also have massive implications for your overall health,” he says.
As part of your circadian rhythm, your body begins to produce melatonin, a hormone that helps to regulate sleep, when it starts to get dark out, Dr. Winter explains. (This is part of the reason why you may feel sleepier earlier in the winter months.)
If you’ve leaned into that and are going to bed earlier than you were before, Dr. Winter says it’s a good idea to bump up your dinnertime to make sure you’re still working with your circadian rhythm. “Everything we do—particularly body movement, exposure to light, and eating—are all little cues that our body uses to understand where we are in time,” he says. “When you have dinner is a cue.”
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