Let's take a look at a major contributor to the aging process and what it can tell us about slowing the ravages of time on our health. The factor we will explore is cortisol, a hormone that controls dozens of vital functions in the body. When cortisol levels are too high or too low, rapid-aging processes accelerate.

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.