What and when you eat at the end of the day can have a large impact on your body. If you eat the right thing at the right time you can actually lose fat while you sleep. Eat the wrong thing at the wrong time and you can plan on waking up with a little more body fat in the morning.

To successfully loss weight, you'll need to stop eating two hours before going to bed. You should not feel hungry before bed, but you should also not feel completely full. When you're trying to lose weight, going to bed at night feeling slightly hungry is actually a good thing. It's your body telling you that what you did that day is working and you're losing body fat. If you don't feel this way when going to bed, you're probably not losing fat.

Now lets say you follow your brain's directive and eat close to bedtime, your body will not dip into the fat it has stored away, and will probably even store some more. Every time you eat, your metabolism increases slightly. However, this effect is minimized late at night. You don't get the same metabolism boosting benefit when you eat just before bed, because a couple of hours after dinner, your body will start preparing for sleep. This natural slowing down of your metabolic rate overrides any metabolic boost you might get from eating. So once you hit the pillow, the only calories you're going to use are the basic calories you need to keep your heart beating and your lungs breathing and allow your eyes to move in REM sleep. This is only a minimal number of calories.

Believe it or not, eating late at night can also inhibit your calorie burning potential the next day. Say, for instance, that you treat yourself to some pasta and fruit at 10 PM one night and go to bed by 11 PM. When your alarm goes off the next morning at seven, the last thing on your mind is going to be breakfast, because you're still full from the pasta and fruit you ate the night before. Chances are you're going to skip breakfast and lose all the great metabolism boosting benefits you'd get from eating a balanced morning meal. Also a number of different studies have suggested that individuals who skip breakfast are more likely to over eat, and make very poor food choices, during lunch and dinner.

Important Tips:

Eating too much food, especially starchy carbohydrates, late at night increases your body fat stores.

Eating high-glycemic carbs (pasta, potatoes, white rice, sugar, etc.) right before bed will spike your insulin levels and lower nighttime Human Growth Hormone production. This is very bad, because not only will lowering nighttime Human Growth Hormone production make you fat, but it will also speed up the again process and make you look old. About 80% of this fat-burning and anti-aging “super hormone” is released during sleep.

Here are a few simple tips to make sure you get the most from your last meal of the day:

Eat about 3 hours before going to bed, you'll have some time to burn off calories but you probably won't get too hungry before going to sleep.

Eat frequently throughout the day, small, healthy meals and snacks spaced about 3 hours apart to minimize hunger cravings at night.

Your last meal should consist mainly of a lean protein like chicken breast, low fat cottage chesses, fish, turkey, and low glycemic carbohydrates like vegetables and fruits. You should avoid all starchy carbs close to bedtime like breads, pastas, rice, potatoes, and cereals. The only time you should be consuming these starchy carbs close to bed is if you workout late at night, because then they will be stored in your muscles for energy instead of being stored as fat.

If you get major carb cravings right before bed, then eat some carbs. Just make sure they're the high-fiber, low-glycemic kind like apples, berries, peaches, plums, citrus fruit, fresh vegetables or vegetable juice.