Jess Cording

But what the research suggests is that when we don't give ourselves enough time to digest before we lie down for the day, that's been shown to negatively impact cardiometabolic health.

Things related to our heart health, sleep quality, blood sugar regulation, that when we're eating too close to bedtime, no matter what it is, just that alone does seem to negatively impact health.

But to your point, I think there's a huge difference between like an entire pizza versus like, you know, a little bit of salad or a bowl of cereal or something like that.

Sure.

Well, you're not wrong about weight gain, first off.

That can also impact heart health.

But, you know, we're looking at things like blood pressure, blood sugar, which is more specific to, we're talking about the diabetes risk, for example, but it's all connected.

And then the brain health piece of the picture, like if our blood vessels to our heart are not in great shape due to lifestyle habits, that's going to negatively impact our brain function.

So it's all connected.

So that's why if you hear like cardio metabolic, it's not just about the heart.

It's about our whole body system.

I'm glad you phrased it that way because so often I'm asked, what time should you stop eating?

And that is so variable because what if somebody works the night shift, right?

And their bedtime is a totally different time of day.

Or what if someone's going to bed really early or they don't get home until late?

What I tend to recommend based on the literature is aiming for two to three hours of when you finish dinner to when you go to sleep.

Yeah.

So what can happen is if your blood sugar drops overnight, that could be very disruptive to sleep.

That's when you may find that you're waking up in the middle of the night, like really disoriented or hungry and needing a snack again.

Yeah.