This question “is eating before bed bad?” I hear quite often. In fact, a customer of mine in my Challenge group asked this last night because you hear this quite often from health and fitness professionals. That eating before bed time is bad, that you shouldn’t do it. Is this a fact or a myth that if you eat before bed, you’ll gain weight?
In fact, it’s a myth. Eating before bed is simple math based on your calories in vs calories out. What does that mean? Calories in are the calories you ingested over the course of the day. This is another topic to be discussed later which is “Good Calories vs Bad or Empty Calories”, but I’ll leave that for another post. By the way, a calorie is a form of measurement to determine the amount of energy in the food. So the word calorie isn’t a bad thing, the type of calorie that you choose to eat can be a bad thing.
In the P90x Nutrition Plan, you have to calculate a few things to figure out which Level you are at (Level I, II, or III) in terms of Calories to be eaten each day. The first thing is your Resting Metabolic Rate which is the calories your body needs to simply live. These are the calories you need to breathe, pump blood, grow hair, blink, etc. The next thing is your Daily Activity Burn which is you day to day activities, walking, talking the stairs, typing on the computer, getting dressed etc. When you add the two of those number together you get the total energy amount. Now when you add in a workout program such as P90X, INSANITY, Les Mills Pump or even Cross Fit, you are burning more calories because your energy output is higher. In the Nutrition Plan for P90X, it estimates an average of 600 calories burned per workout. Now this is a an estimate and some workouts you may burn more, you may burn less depending on your level of fitness and your level of intensity during the workouts.
So time for some simple math, because the question to “Is Eating Before Bed Bad” or “Is It Bad To Eat At Night” is just simple math. So if your average Resting Metabloic Rate (what keeps you alive) is 1800 Calories, and your Daily Activity Burn is 360 calories, your energy amount is 2160 Calories for the day. That is if you aren’t exercising or doing P90x. Add in 600 calories if you are doing P90X and that’s 2760 calories burned during the day. 
The problem is most Americans will have consumed 1500 to 2000 before or by dinner. By that time you will have either hit your total Calories needed for the day or exceeded them. Think of it as a Gas Tank for your car. You car can only hold a certain amount of fuel. If you put too much gas in your car, it spills out and you stop filling up. Human beings have a similar principle but our gas tank is extendible and when we overfill our gas tank it doesn’t spill out, instead the extra calories is stored as fat. Fat is stored energy.
So yes, if you ingest your daily calories needed by dinner time, anything on top of that will be converted and stored as fat. That is why you hear “if you want to lose weight, stop eating at night” from the experts. So if your Daily Energy amount is 2400 and before bed time you have burned 2,000 calories but you sit down and have a bowl of ice cream that is 400 Calories, you will be at your daily energy intake for the day. If you go over that number by a couple of calories, it’s stored. You may think that’s not too bad but, 100 calories over hear, 50 over there and the compound interest effect happens and in five years you are 20 to 50 lbs heavier and you wonder how that happened.
If you want to learn more about this I recommend P90X and actually reading the nutrition guide, You can learn more by joining the Team Beachbody Club, and below is a scanned nutrition guide that you get with all of Beachbody’s weight loss programs like Power 90, Slim in 6 and Turbo Jam. It will give you a more general overview of what we discussed and also give you a different perspective about eating at night. The guide below is what helped me with Power 90 and my weight loss of 31 lbs in 90 days with that program.
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