Does eating high-calorie dinners contribute to more weight gain than high-calorie breakfasts and lunch?

I seem to do best when I have quite a light dinner in terms of weight.

There are two issues that come up when concentrating calories into dinner:

1. As your body processes the dinner, your blood sugar can spike and in turn disrupt your sleep.

2. You don’t have sufficent ready energy for moving or thinking the next day. The brain actually uses up a lot of calories when you are concentrating.

Dinner should be the least amount of calories of the day. Since you typically aren’t active after dinner time you don’t need to “fuel up.” Those calories go unused and are stored as fat.

I would say you aren’t helping weight loss by eating the most calories at dinner.

Well, I would think so. The typical person expends the least amount of calories in the evening.

My nutritionist, who helped my lose 50lbs., told me that meals should get smaller as the day goes on.

What about people who work nights?

@flo Then it would be reversed. They would have breakfast before their shift started, say at 11 p.m., and their dinner would be when it ended at 9 a.m. and they went home to sleep.
The whole key is when the most calories are burned vs being stored against a famine that we, on this thread, will probably never see.

I don’t think it makes a bit of difference. I can’t sleep if I’m hungry, so I would try to eat a 600–700 calorie meal if I was limiting to 1500 a day.

@JLeslie I was hoping that would be the case…in my case. But after a month of sticking with 1500 cal a day with heavy and satisfying dinner around 600 cal or so, I gained 13 lbs.

But yes, my problem is I don’t feel satisfied with light meals at dinner.

@mazingerz88 Are you sure you’re calculating your calories right? Depending how big you are, you shouldn’t be gaining weight on 1500 calories a day. And 600 is not a ton of calories for dinner. I’m only 5 ’ 1” and 1400 or 1500 will sustain my weight and I can lose on 1000 or less.

@janbb Thanks, I’m using an app to log in food and calorie content based on the info on the app and sometimes I google to get the calorie count.

I also don’t exercise at all, something I should do already.

@mazingerz88 I can tell you my nutrition professor would agree with me.

How tall are you?

1500 is for the most part a certain weight. That is not a lot of calories unless your fairly short. 1500 with low moderate exercise is probably around 135 lbs? No exercise maybe 145? You would need to do the BMR calculation. Although, more importantly you just need to figure it out for yourself, meaning your individual number that works for you. Make sure you’re adding the calories correctly.

Try to eat more veggies. Especially, leafy greens. Also, try cutting out dairy for a few days and see what happens.

If you are eating fewer calories than what it should take to maintain your current weight, then mostly you are storing protein (amino acids) and carbs (glycogen) efficiently and none if it is going to fat. If you are overeating heavily at one meal then the excess would go to fat, which is harder to get rid of. Or, if you are eating high fat meals too.