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Question: Does eating late at night cause you to gain weight?

Answer: According to a recent study, “eating at night is no more likely to promote weight gain than eating during the day.”1 This makes sense if you think of weight gain as a direct consequence of over-consumption – we eat more calories than we need. These extra calories get stored in the body as fat whether they come from our breakfast, our lunch, or our late dinner. The problem with late night eating and the reason it has been connected to weight gain has more to do with what we choose to eat at that time than the actual time itself. More often than not, late night meals and especially late night snacks are opportunities for us to indulge in our favorite foods. These much loved foods include pizza, burgers, fries, ice-cream, potato chips, cookies, chocolates, etc. But if you were to make these choices for breakfast or lunch they would go to your waistline, hips, butt, or belly just as quickly and easily. Eating the same meal at 3pm or at 10pm doesn’t magically change its composition or its total number of calories. So, the long answer to your question is, as long as you are making healthy food choices, you should eat whenever you are hungry – day or night.

1 Oregon Health & Science University (2006, February 2). Scientists Dispel Late-Night Eating/Weight Gain Myth. ScienceDaily.

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