2 AM “Eat Until Sleepy” Routine Validated by Science

Researchers at Japan’s Yamaguchi University have done a thing in the grand pursuit of knowledge about how humans can best binge-eat their way out of jet lag, and here is what they did: they put a bunch of mice on a normal schedule of food and daylight, then they turned off the lights completely and tried to reverse the clock through switching the feeding times. Turns out, the food as a regulatory mechanism was enough to get the mice switched onto the new schedule. Then they tried the switch again, injecting half the mice with an insulin-blocking compound, and those mice took twice as long to adjust as the mice who were just happily eating their way to artificial normalcy.

“In short,” says Discover Magazine, “insulin seems to help our stomach’s clock rapidly sync up with mealtimes–which helps our bodies’ entire circadian clock sync up with our daily sleep/wake cycle.”

So you can eat lots of insulin-producing carbs to be sleepy, or also eat lots of insulin-blocking fat and protein to wake up. Story checks out? This is how I have been living my entire life to date?? Sometimes when there’s nothing else to burn you have to set yourself on fire, i.e. eat a whole second dinner in the wee hours and coma yourself into bed?