Friday Mythbustin': Don't Eat Before Bedtime

Myth: If you don't eat before bedtime, your body won't store up the calories and you won't gain weight.

Fact: If you eat more calories than you burn, it doesn't matter when you eat them.

I guess it kind of makes sense. If you eat only when you're doing stuff, you'll burn more of the calories, right? When you're sleeping, all you're doing is just . . . sleeping.

Yeah. But to be honest with you, when you're sleeping, you're not burning that many fewer calories than when you're sitting watching TV (Fitday.com gives you no calorie credit for doing either one). Unless you're actually up and moving, eating before you sit down for that Seinfeld marathon is exactly the same as eating before you sleep.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts showed that going to bed hungry (Going 3 hours without eating before bedtime) increased a person's risk of obesity by over 100%! The only things worse were eating breakfast out of the house (137%) and not eating breakfast at all (A whopping 450%!).

Now some people swear by this weight-loss trick, and have had terrific luck with it. I think there's a reason for this:

A lot of people only have access to food once they get home from work. They come home, eat dinner, and then snack until bed time. By eliminating all the pre-bedtime snacks, they significantly cut their calorie intake. As long as they don't eat the food at other times (which they don't, because they're not in the house at other times), they're going to experience weight loss.

What I want to do is reassure them that if they give in and have something, they don't need to beat themselves up over it. In fact, it's probably a good idea.

Obviously, this isn't permission to eat the whole pint of Chubby Dumpy Ice Cream, but it does say that eating is just as important a tool in weight loss as the not eating is.

So grab that apple, or have a little meal replacement shake. High protein meals before bed help the muscle grow while you're sleeping.

Just be reasonable about it.

Alice's Adventures In Turnaround

In Lewis Carroll's book, Through The Looking Glass, there's a scene that's always stuck in my brain. It's not in any of the adaptations I've seen, but the scene rings true for me, and the scene is incredibly resonant.

In the book, Alice meets the Red Queen, who is not a playing card, but rather, a chess piece. After some amusing exchanges, this happens:

Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying "Faster!" but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. "I wonder if all the things move along with us?" thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, "Faster! Don't try to talk!"

Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so out of breath: and still the Queen cried, "Faster! Faster!" and dragged her along. "Are we nearly there?" Alice managed to pant out at last.

"Nearly there!" the Queen repeated. "Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!" And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

"Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!" And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her against a tree, and said kindly, "You may rest a little now."

Alice looked round her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree all the time! Everything's just as it was!"

"Of course it is," said the Queen: "what would you have it?"

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Not to correct poor Alice, but I think there are plenty of times in this country where things seem to work exactly as they do on the Red Queen's chessboard. We run and work and labor and try just to have things stay the same, at it seems like the effort to make something actually change is Herculean.

The Abs Diet

So my new reading is The Abs Diet, the bright orange book you've seen at the bookstore and supermarket.

The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief of Men's Health magazine, and it shows. The writing has the same type of "We want to seem hip so bad, we're going to show you how hip we are at least once a paragraph," writing style that litters the magazine, which wouldn't be nearly so annoying if his definition of "hip" didn't match with that of a sophomore in high school. Hip means beer and girls.

Add to that the title and the promise--washboard abs in six weeks.

That's ludicrous all the way around. People don't need abs. Abs are nice, and are a good sign you've lost weight--the guys who track this kind of stuff say that you'll see abs when your body fat gets down around 11%--but they aren't vital to good health.

And, add to that the cutesy way he tries to make the "12 authorized foods" fit his acronym "ABS DIET POWER 12." A is for "Almonds and other nuts." S is for "Spinach and other leafy greens." The list is extremely forced.

There, in a handful of paragraphs, you have my only complaints about the entire book. The nutrition is sound, the logic is good, the recipes look tasty. He also points out it isn't a diet so much as a way of eating--an important aspect of not just losing a couple quick pounds, but about changing your lifestyle.

A lot of people are skipping the big thick book and just buying the little $8 Food Guide, which includes the chapters from the book on food, along with recipes and lists of what to get when eating out.

Worth a look.

Here I Come Back From The Dead, Oh No . . . . . !!!

I got a little under the weather.

For those who don't read my other blog, I'm currently writing a screenplay. It's been interesting, because the book I'm using as a guide is one that acknowledges the difficulties of writing a screenplay. "No other book acknowledges the fact that you think you're going to die of this," quoth the book, and the amazing part is, it's right.

The way the book does it, see, is by paralleling the difficulties you're going through writing the thing with the difficulties your hero is facing throughout your movie.

At the start, you know you want to write a movie, but you're not really sure what all it's going to entail or how it's going to be. Your hero--same thing. He starts out wanting something but he's not sure what he will have to through between now and then.

And then you start getting into it, and you have to keep going forward not looking back, even when it starts to look a little harder than you thought. Ditto your hero.

And as things get going, there's actually a time where the screenwriter and the hero both just feel like throwing in the towel. This isn't what they signed up for, it's not what they wanted it to be, they can tell so much of what's gone before is just bad, bad, bad.

That's the day when it's the hardest for the screenwriter to sit down and plunk out the pages. That's when it takes fortitude and guts and character to keep on going and see it through.

It's true in screenplays. It's true in movies.

And it's true in 365 day turnarounds.

The car problems stunk. Being sick stunk. Coming back up four pounds (wonder why the Tale of the Tape hasn't been updated in a while?) stunk.

So there's that moment where you have to knuckle down, recognize the cost of what you wanted, and decide you want it anyway.

Onward, ho!