Hi Reader

A few years ago I started stopping eating by 6pm — not for any dramatic reason, just because it felt better. No snacking in front of the telly, no "one more bit of cheese" while I'm tidying the kitchen. Dinner happens, then the kitchen closes.

What I didn't expect was how much it seemed to change my sleep.

It's not just what you eat — it's when you stop

Sleep and blood sugar are more tangled together than most people realise. Over 35% of adults in the UK report regularly sleeping fewer than 7 hours per night (NHS, 2023), and even a single night of shortened sleep has been shown to measurably worsen how the body handles blood sugar the next day (Leproult & Van Cauter, 2010).

It's not just what's on the plate — it's how much room you give yourself between the last bite and the pillow.

There's a small but genuinely interesting study that speaks to this directly. Researchers had a group of men with prediabetes eat all their meals within an early window, finishing by mid-afternoon, versus a normal all-day eating pattern — same food, same calories, just different timing (Sutton et al., 2018). The early-eating group saw meaningfully better insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure, and — this is the part that struck me — a reduced desire to eat in the evening. It's a small study, and the cut-off they tested was earlier than most of us would manage, but it's a genuine signal that timing itself, not just content, has a metabolic effect.

What this looks like day to day

I'm not suggesting everyone needs a hard 6pm cut-off — that's just what happens to work for me. But there's something worth noticing in the gap between "last bite" and "lights out." Research suggests that giving the body a longer, uninterrupted stretch without food overnight may support both blood sugar regulation and appetite the next day.

In my experience working with clients, the evening snacking that feels hardest to shift often isn't really about hunger. It's a "reward" — the mental full stop on a long day, the thing that says I'm done now. Once someone has an earlier finish line for eating itself, that reward-seeking tends to quieten on its own — not because they're resisting the biscuit tin, but because they've already given the day its close.

You might find it useful to notice your own natural cut-off point this week, without forcing a change — just paying attention to when the kitchen actually "closes" for you, and whether evening snacking shows up more on the nights it stays open longer.

You don't need a rule about when to stop eating. You need to notice when your body — and your day — already wants to be done.

Until next time — eat well, and give yourself the gap.