Some food and nutrition advocates suggest that eating dinner early will help you lose weight, especially if you consume your meal at least three hours before you go to bed. Others believe the opposite, and think that you should not only eat dinner, but might want to finish your evening with a light snack, since hunger during the night can interrupt sleep, and poor sleep can contribute to weight gain. The issue of eating dinner early is complex and needs a little explanation.

Many people suggest that Western society tends to focus too much on dinner, and that it often is the largest meal of the day. We also eat it fast, consuming more than we need because we don’t allow ourselves to naturally feel full. Other countries take longer with large meals like dinner, and as such, tend to actually be thinner than many Americans and Canadians. Eating dinner early may not be as important as what and how we eat.

If you want to vote for the most important meal of a day, you’ll lose out if you vote on dinner. Breakfast tends to be most important, and some nutritionists recommend higher calorie breakfast and lunch with relatively light dinners. There is suggestion that eating proper meals at breakfast and lunch also help us to eat less at dinner, especially if we’re paying attention to the process of eating. Other diet plans spread out calorie distribution evenly, in three, four or six meals, so that calorie intake through the day is pretty constant. Eating more frequent meals that are smaller may indeed help people resist cravings, which can promote sticking to a diet and losing some weight.

The main theory behind eating dinner early is that we tend to be less active as the day progresses. Our evenings may consist of TV watching, and our bodies slow down, as we get more tired. This isn’t true for everyone. Some people clean their homes at night, squeeze in a workout or take a walk. If you’re still exerting yourself in the evening, then eating dinner early may have little to no effect on whether your overall diet promotes weight loss. In fact, you may find yourself very hungry if you do a lot at night, which might suggest the snack approach toward evening’s end.

What appears to matter more than when you eat your dinner, is what you eat for dinner and your overall calorie intake for the day. If you consume more calories than you use, you will have a hard time maintaining or losing weight. If you eat fewer calories than you use, weight loss may be a little easier. People vary in response to weight gain and weight loss on various diets, but still the number one way to lose weight is to eat healthfully and get some exercise. If you find that eating dinner early helps this process along, there’s nothing wrong with trying it. On the other hand, if you find that an early meal makes you much more inclined to crave foods or you feel incredibly hungry at bedtime, it may make sense to move your dinner hour to later or add a healthful snack toward the end of the day.