The After-Six Diet Revisited
It's been many years since sports and TV celebrity Christine Jacob made famous the After-Six Diet. The concept of losing weight by not eating after six pm was an instant hit with dieters who believed they could eat whatever they wanted as long as it was before the “magic” hour.
Curbing nighttime calories was already being advocated twenty years ago by respected obesity researchers like James Hill and Wayne Callaway. They believed that calories eaten at night are stored more easily than calories eaten during the day.
This was a scientific endorsement of that old adage, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper”.
However, in 1997, a ten-year study of the eating habits of 7,000 people showed that it made no difference whether people ate the majority of their calories before or after 5:00 pm. “Eating fewer calories at night won't make you thinner”, declared nutritionists of the renowned Tufts University.
So, like many fad diets, the after-six's popularity peaked and eventually waned. But the diet may have resurrected in a new form.
One of Oprah Winfrey's weight loss “secrets” is not eating after 8:00 at night. Before you think it's simply a matter of Christine getting the time wrong and Oprah getting it right, you need to know that what's important is setting a cut-off time three hours before your individual bedtime.
This can help you lose weight if you tend to snack after dinner. It is a “gatekeeper” that stops unnecessary excess calories from taking up residence in your fat cells. It also gives you enough time to digest your food so you don't go to sleep on a full stomach.
The old after-six approach was too restrictive. It left many people dizzy and weak with hunger especially if their bedtime was ten or eleven o'clock. That is too long to go without food. It also puts a damper on what should be a sacred daily ritual – the family dinner.
Today's busy lifestyles leave little time for families to eat together during breakfast and lunch. The only time that parents and children can sit down at leisure to socialize, bond, and discuss the day's events are during dinner. It isn't much fun to just sit there and not eat anything while everyone digs into adobo and sinigang. If you hide in your room as many former after-sixers used to do, you miss out on family camaraderie.
What about the advice to eat light at night or to avoid starchy carbohydrates when the sun sets? There may be some merit to these suggestions.
There is a new concept called “within day energy balance” espoused by sports nutritionist Dan Bernardot, which suggests that caloric intake should correspond with activity level at any given time of the day. This means that if you are inactive at night, you should eat light. But if you work out at night, you should eat more to fuel the calories you just burned.
As for no starch at night, there is preliminary evidence that insulin sensitivity is at its lowest in the evening. This theory proposes that the body stores calories more easily when you eat large amounts of starch at night because it is not as efficient at that time in managing insulin and glucose.
Ultimately, setting a cut-off time to stop eating at night, eating light dinners, and not eating carbs in the evening will only help you lose weight if by practicing these techniques you are taking in fewer calories than you are burning in a 24-hour period.
Pigging out before six or eight o'clock in the belief that calories before the “deadline” are somehow less fattening than calories after was not then and still is now not scientifically correct.