Ask a Health Coach: Sleep, Weight Loss Stalls, and Skipping the Gym

How bad is working and eating late at night? Wondering why you’re not losing weight? And what if you don’t want to go back to the gym? In this week’s edition of Ask a Health Coach, Erin is back to answer more of your questions. Keep them coming in the comments below or over in our Mark’s Daily Apple Facebook Group.

Jacob asked:

“My nighttime habits are the worst. I stay up too late working, then I’m hungry and go looking for a snack at 1 or 2 am. I don’t think I should be working and eating that late, but how bad is it really?”

Your intuition is spot on here, Jacob. The late-night artificial light. The late-night insulin spike. The stress of a disrupted sleep cycle. It all comes down to your circadian rhythm, which as reiterated in this study, https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/89/1/128/2840303)‘>¹⁶

Late-night snacking can make the problem worse. Not because “eating late at night causes you to store fat” (as our misinformed culture likes to tell us), but because, in a manner of speaking, your body can either produce metabolism hormones or sleep hormones — not both at the same time. The production of melatonin will slow or cease in order to metabolize your evening snack. This study from scientists at Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil backs it up, finding that men and women who consumed high amounts of calories right before bed spent even less time in REM sleep.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12566476/‘>¹⁸

I admit that the scale is the easiest way to measure your progress, but it’s not the most accurate. Most often, when the number changes, it’s due to fluctuations in things like water, glycogen, and waste. Even if the number is consistently going down, there could be a good chance you’re losing lean muscle tissue, not fat!

So, instead of focusing on an utterly pointless number that’s not moving — or moving in the wrong direction — there are better indicators that your body is losing fat. Here are some of my favorites:

• Your pants feel looser
• Your tops close more easily
• Your face looks slimmer
• You’re sleeping better
• You’re less hungry in between meals
• You have more energy
• People are asking if you’ve lost weight

If you’re really interested in knowing how well you’re doing, go ahead and get out the measuring tape. I had a client once who would measure herself consistently each Sunday, keeping an Excel spreadsheet of every single change. From week to week, she was seeing only small changes, but when she looked at the data over the course of a few months it was pretty mindblowing.

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