Wait. If you can eat dinner at 9 p.m., you can wait until 9 p.m. — a snack now adds calories without replacing dinner, triggers insulin (even a “healthy” one), and extends your eating window. Patterson and Sears’s review found that patterns reducing nighttime eating and prolonging the nightly fast may produce sustained health improvements. And the hunger itself passes: ghrelin comes in pulses that rise and spontaneously fall at your customary meal times, with no food arriving. Two corrections to the folk versions of this advice — whether a snack “counts” depends on its form (a whole apple cut the next meal by 15%, juice by nothing), and drinking water will not make you less hungry now, whatever you have heard.
This companion covers the case for waiting, what actually happens if you stay hungry, when snacking makes sense, and what genuinely makes waiting easier. (6 min read)