can you literally burn more fat at night and if you really burn more fat at night are you actually losing weight from it or does it really even matter is it just calories the bottom line is that there is a very strong difference between fat oxidation at night and carb oxidation at night fat oxidation is in essence fat burning whereas carb oxidation is burning carbs let's just hypothetically say for simple math that you burn 1,000 calories while you're sleeping would you rather burn a th000 calories from fat or 1,000 calories from carbs if you burn 1,000 calories from fat you're probably losing weight if you burn 1,000 calories from carbs you're probably just depleting your muscle glycogen or mainly your liver glycogen probably not your muscle glycogen so on that I would much rather oxidize fat right well there was a study that was published in obesity that helps us understand how we might be able to Leverage things to get more fat oxidation at night now this video has more to it than just this study so please stick with me because we'll put it all together and make some sense of it but this obesity study had subjects do either a 9 and 1 half hour overnight fast or a 16 and 1 half hour overnight fast where they were going to bed in a little bit more of a fasted State and they took subjects that were healthy compared to subjects that had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease trust me there is a point here okay what they found is that both groups that were in the longer fast both healthy people and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease people they had increases in their fat oxidation nocturnally so at night they were burning more fat and a decrease in their carb oxidation they were burning less carbs now that doesn't really surprise me at first right because I'm thinking well yeah you're going to bed a little more hungry so it would make sense that you'd be in a deficit and you'd probably be burning some more fat but what was really interesting about this was that they measured their liver glycogen so they measured the amount of carbs that were in their liver after they woke up and they didn't deplete any of their liver glycogen their liver glycogen was still full this is mind-boggling because this tells us that even though there was some carb oxidation it wasn't depleting liver glycogen but it also tells us that the fat burning didn't happen because we depleted glycogen you see a lot of times when you look at fat loss you look at okay well you've depleted liver glycogen first you drain the liver of all the carbohydrates that are there and then you start oxidizing the fats right but in this case liver glycogen was never even tapped into but they noticed that a longer fast or being hungry going to bed they oxidize significantly more fat and significantly less carbs now let me explain what could be happening here there's no data to back this up we just have to kind of guess but this is a very educated guess there is a process called gluconeogenesis and that is where the liver will create carbohydrates from other things in the body from amino acids from lactate but mainly from glycerol which is part of the fatty acid backbone so it is the fatty acid backbone so when you start burning fat you are left with a glycerol molecule because these people were burning more fat overnight they were left with this backbone this part of the fat that didn't get oxidized it's like the skeleton and that goes to the liver and gets turned into glucose so therefore there was no need to deplete liver glycogen the liver had its own fuel so this sounds very complex and I know it really does but what we're hearing from this is that going to bed a little bit hungry actually changes not just the calorie side of you eating less but it also tilts scale towards you oxidizing more fat at night so I ask you again you want to burn 1,000 calories from fat or 1,000 calories from carbs now it's never going to be 100% one or the other but you do that simple math now let's look at another thing because there's a study published in obesity research and clinical practice this illustrates an interesting point it actually sheds a lot of light on something that can help us burn more fat at night okay it took overweight people and healthy people that were not overweight put them in a metabolic chamber okay and had them sleep there and they found that overweight people ended up oxidizing more carbs at night than the healthy weight people they oxidized more fat what was interesting is they ate the same amount of carbohydrates and they ate the same time before bed so what this teaches us is that when we are metabolically healthy we actually do oxidize more fat and when we're metabolically unhealthy we oxidize more carbs at night now when we get into this next study this will all make sense and it helps illustrate what we should do but before we get into that study let's sort of take a glimpse at what might work like what you may want to do you may want to try eating a large lean protein meal closer to like 4 p.m. a few days per week because no matter your metabolic state if you have a lower carb lower fat higher protein meal six or so hours before bed you're likely going to get into a fat oxidation mode okay here's what's really wild there's a study that was published on Obesity that I'm going to reference a different study in obesity that talks about how critical it is to get your sort of fat burning up at night compared to your car burning at night okay so we're going to talk about that in a second so like I would recommend maybe just like super lean 93 96% lean ground beef or something have something like that maybe some veggies something that would keep you satiated but isn't a huge caloric Surplus because the next study I'm going to talk about talks about how eating too much in one sitting or in one day can actually impact your fat burning at night for days after that and if you're looking for some good quality beef I put a link for the beef that I use all the time it's from butcherbox stuff is hands down the best grass-fed grassfish beef that I've ever had they have bison they have salmon they have chicken they have New Yorks they have filets you name it and it's delivered right to your doorstep that stuff is awesome so that link down below is a link to like even my custom boxes so boxes with cuts that I would recommend so if eat meat you've got to try them out and also they are a huge supporter of this channel so the best way that you can support this channel is by supporting the brands that make this content possible and they're all brands that I personally use and recommend so that link down below is for butcher boox to get yourself some ground beef and some steak okay so the study that was published in obesity took a look at 34 people and it measured their 24-hour what's called energy expenditure how many calories they were burning over the course of 24 hours and they were looking at different amounts of food so they looked at them in a UK caloric state or a hypercaloric state okay so they were looking at what happens if they ate a 40% caloric Surplus they had them eat this way for 3 days so ate at Baseline calories or slight Surplus calories they found when people overage or ate in a surplus it affected their fat loss for 24 hours after that Surplus so 24 hours after eating too much their fat loss downregulated and it was even more so downregulated nocturnally at night so remember one of the easiest ways we can burn fat is to potentially increase our nocturnal fat burning overeating just by 40% in one day turns off your nocturnal fat burning significantly what's interesting is that nocturnal fat oxidation was one of the largest strongest predictive indicators of who was going to gain weight over the next 5 years basically with a 41% variance it was able to determine that so basically they saw flat out if people ended up having low fat oxidation low fat burning at night they were significantly more likely to gain a lot of weight over the next 5 years and become obese so it's somewhat reverse causation in the sense that like maybe people that were having bad fat oxidation at night were already metabolically unhealthy so that could have been a strong predictive indicator but what we do know is entirely clear here is that metabolic health shortterm and long-term are linked with our ability to oxidize fat at night so the best thing that we can do is incourage nighttime fat burning so even little things like again eating a few hours before bed and some days eating not even before bed at all skipping dinner all together also making sure you never have days where you have an outrageous Surplus over about 20% I know that's difficult but realist I istically when you start creeping over a 20% Surplus like going a few hundred calories over where you really should it impacts your fat burning for days to come and nights to come so it come back to the original question like how do we burn more fat at night well first of all go to bed a little bit hungry have protein about five or 6 hours before bed along with possibly some Fiber thirdly get the fat off of you as much as you can the more that you get the fat off of you the better you're going to sleep and the better your fat oxidation is going to be because we've also seen in the literature that the deeper the sleep that you get in the better the overall fat oxidation is during sleep if you're constantly waking up and you're constantly getting aroused throughout the night you're going to end up oxidizing more carbs and you're not going to tap into the fat as much so it may sound like well I'm only burning a couple hundred calories or a few calories from fat at night does it really matter this is free fat loss people like free fat loss so if you can tilt the scale towards more fat burning at Night by doing these little things these add up to humongous numbers in the course of a year and that explains why people that don't oxidize fat well at night have a clearer chance of ending up overweight or obese I'll see you tomorrow