MEAL PLANNER FOR A PEACEFUL NIGHT
IN ORDER to fully resync your sleep rhythm, you have to change your eating patterns to support your body’s digestive cycle. Consider this your new menu for sleep: O KEEP to regular mealtimes. Your body learns to anticipate feeding time, releasing enzymes and hormones to help with digestion. Eating at the same time every day not only ensures that you’re digesting properly, but it also guarantees that the ebb and flow of your metabolism is in sync with your master clock.
This goes for the weekends, too. If you change your habits for just those two days, you’re inflicting social ‘jet lag’ on your rhythm. And suffice to say that your body functions don’t observe the days of the week. O BREAK the fast gently. The morning is when your body is shifting back into day mode, but hasn’t fully hit its stride. Gently introduce food to your digestive system with a light, nutrient-rich breakfast.
Smoothies are a particularly great way to deliver maximum nutrition without putting a lot of stress on digestion. Another sleep-promoting option is to not eat a morning meal and follow an intermittent fasting protocol (see box, below). O EAT your biggest meal at noon. Your digestive system is primed to receive the majority of its fuel in the middle of the day, between 10am and 2pm. Feed your system with a robust (ideally whole-food, veg-filled) lunch that delivers most of your daily nourishment. This will alleviate how much you feel the need to eat in the evening, when your digestive flame begins to dim. O REDEFINE dinner. Eating a large meal in the evening is a relatively new idea. Yes, it’s a nice time to socialise and reflect on the day, but eating a lot of food late on is not doing your digestion, or your waistline, any favours.
By the time the sun starts to set, your digestive tract is preparing for its night-time shift. So the later in the day you eat, the higher the chance that your food won’t be properly digested, leading to problems such as acid reflux, cramp and an upset digestion. It’s also making your digestive system work overtime, giving you less restful sleep and skewing the balance of microflora that inhabit the gut at night-time. Also, when you routinely eat your biggest meal at night, you are prompting your body to produce ghrelin, the hunger hormone, when production would normally be waning. This ultimately trains your body to become hungry when it wouldn’t normally be and interrupts an important hormonal rhythm, while also causing your body to store abdominal fat.
So the bottom line is: eat a light evening meal, at least two to three hours before you go to bed. Even better, go for four. But if you do eat late one night, don’t stay up trying to hit the two-hour mark. Just go to bed and start afresh the next day.