(I hope this is the right board for this, if not please move to the appropriate board, thanks in advance)

Well, people often say that you'll get fat if you sleep after you eat. Is that true?
Are the positions of sleep influence of the fat increase? I mean maybe like if you sleep in sitting position has lower fat increase than when you sleep in lay position.
And what the cause of it?

Hi, this is what I primarily study.

To answer your question: no, absolutely not. Nutritional timing pays such little regard into the overall human body composition that unless your job is to be an IFBB Pro, you'll never need to worry about it. Furthermore, no position of sleep has ANY impact on body composition.

There's this dumb notion that you "shouldn't eat carbs after 6PM", this is silly. The idea is that you'll be consuming your calories, but you won't be burning them. This is because you burn less calories whilst asleep than whilst awake. What they fail to consider is the amount of hours you're awake and not eating. Overall, using the Harris Benedict formula, you can find approximately how much energy expenditure you can expect in a day. Eating under that amount of food in kilocalories will make you lose weight. Eating over that amount will make you gain weight. There's 3500 kcals (roughly) in a pound. If you eat at a 500 kcal surplus a day, you can expect to gain roughly 1 pound a week.

Hope I helped. Bottom line: no. No you will not get fat because you sleep a certain way, nor eat right before you sleep.

DrHax, for clarification, do you primarily study fat, sleep or fat sleeping?


LOL

Arglax Moderated Message:

Oh you.

I heard that it is bad to sleep after you eat because your body does not digest food whilst asleep.

@Immortal Pig: I study Kinesiology. Nutrition, Fitness, and a tad bit of business.

@ThePirateKing: As I already said, this is false.

Quick question then. I've heard that when you sleep is when your body replenishes the enzymes that it uses to digest more complex components of foods, like certain fats and proteins. A) Is that true? b) if a is true, would that mean that eating food later in the day result in less calories from the food, as less of it gets broken down? and c) you say that the amount of energy burned when awake just seems greater than when asleep because of the amount of time spent awake vs. time spent asleep. Is there an actual difference though in burning calories between a person asleep and a person who is awake, but sedentary?

Just wondering, cause I get mixed answers from whoever I ask, so more sources the better.

If I don't answer something or address something, it's because I don't know the answer. I won't say anything I don't 100% know the answer to because our field is saturated with false information.

You burn more calories awake than asleep. Living a more sedentary lifestyle, ergo, staying on your couch and sleeping, makes you have a much lower calorie expenditure.

Food doesn't just "disappear" when the clock strikes midnight. I think of food in more of a week long log of things you eat, divide it up by 7, and work with that. It's easier to gauge one's diet over a week long time than over a day. A day "ends" when you sleep.

So some tl;dr stuff:

1) Being asleep burns less calories than being sedentary which burns less calories than being active which burns less calories than cardiovascular activity.

2) If you consume the majority of your calories at night, you need to account for the fact you were going hours without food during the day. Think of that as like negative calories.

3) Other things like nutrient timing, protein synthesizing, the "furnace effect" of eating lots of tiny meals a day, etc. etc. only really needs to be considered if it's your life job to take advantage of every measure as possible.

Like this guy:

He looks like a road map
Does masturbating count as cardiovascular activity

You want crazy forearms? Sounds like you do.

This is my friend's forearms...

That doesn't look healthy at all. It looks like what somebody's arm might look like after they carved off like a pound of their flesh around the veins, then transplanted skin back over it.