Eating taboos after staying up late

If you have just stayed up late, the three categories that you should immediately avoid are heavy foods with high sugar and oil, iced drinks and excessive amounts of caffeine. Don’t believe the nonsense about “treat yourself to something good after a long night”. If you eat indiscriminately, you will feel uncomfortable for at least most of the next day.

Speaking of which, I didn’t believe in evil before. I always felt that I was in charge of it all in my early twenties. When I was in college, I stayed up all night with my roommates. After the show in the morning, I went directly to the skewers stall in front of the school to show off ten skewers of grilled mutton and iced beer. I went back to the dormitory and fell asleep after a day. I didn’t have anything but a headache. Until last year's Double 11, I stayed up 36 hours with the operation team to rush the big sale online. When we broke up, everyone started to go eat butter hot pot. I just took two mouthfuls of hairy tripe with iced Coke. I felt nauseous and broke into a cold sweat on the spot. After I lay down at home for two days, my stomach was still bloated like a ball. Later, after asking a nutritionist, I found out that when staying up late, the sympathetic nerves are highly tense, the blood supply to the gastrointestinal tract is more than 30% lower than usual, and the secretion of digestive enzymes is also reduced. At this time, stuffing heavy oil, spicy and high sugar foods is completely confusing the already overloaded body.

The dietary guidelines for people who stay up late released by the Chinese Nutrition Society in 2023 mentioned that staying up late for more than 6 hours in a row will reduce the body's insulin sensitivity by 15%-20%. To put it bluntly, the body's ability to process sugar is directly reduced by 20% at this moment. It is okay to drink a cup of full-sugar milk tea at ordinary times, but drinking it now will most likely raise the sugar level and drop it quickly. Not only can it not withstand sleepiness, but it is also easy to accumulate extra fat and get acne. Many people stay up late and eat sweets, which makes them more tired. This is the reason. I plan to stay up until after two o'clock. The next morning I will definitely not touch the iced bread or dirty buns from the convenience store downstairs. I will just drink a bowl of warm millet porridge with a small plate of cold vegetables. The warm feeling in my stomach is much more comfortable than eating sweet food.

At this point, someone must be asking, so I'm so sleepy after staying up all night that I have to drink something to cheer me up, right? Can't touch coffee at all? This matter is actually quite controversial. There are two schools of thought around me: one is a group of colleagues from Internet companies. Basically, everyone has a coffee cup. After staying up late, they drink a large cup of iced Americano and still have a two-hour meeting. ； The other group is from friends in the fitness circle. They say that the heart beats faster after staying up late, and adding caffeine is purely a burden on the cardiovascular system. After checking the relevant research, both sides are right: if you just stay up until 1 or 2 o'clock, and have a normal schedule the next day, drinking a small cup of Americano with about 150 mg (about half of the medium cup in a convenience store) is absolutely fine, and it can really refresh you. ； However, if you have been up for more than 24 hours in a row and consume more than 200 mg of caffeine, the risk of arrhythmia will be 37% higher than usual. At this time, it is better to brew some warm light green tea and add two mint leaves, which is refreshing and not too irritating.

There are also many people who feel hot all over their bodies after staying up late, and want to eat iced watermelon or drink iced milk tea when they open their mouths. This is also a big pitfall. Last week, a colleague of mine stayed up all night to make a tender document. He went to the company and ate half of a watermelon that had just been taken out of the refrigerator. He was admitted to the hospital with acute gastroenteritis that afternoon, and his symptoms did not recover until the next day. The views of traditional Chinese medicine and modern nutrition are quite consistent on this point: Chinese medicine says that staying up late hurts yin, which itself causes deficiency and fire to rise. If it gets cold, it is easy to hold back the "fire" in the body. ； Modern nutrition believes that the gastrointestinal mucosal barrier is relatively fragile after staying up late, and ice can stimulate vasoconstriction and easily cause cramps. Of course, there are exceptions. My junior brother who runs marathons all year round has no problem showing off a box of iced cream cakes after staying up all night. Such ruthless people with good metabolisms don’t need to impose strict rules. Ordinary people should not take this risk.

In fact, there aren’t that many strict rules. After all, everyone’s body constitution is very different. If you really want to eat something heavy, it’s not completely out of the question. It’s better to wait for three or four hours after staying up late and wait until your body is stable before eating, than to stop eating right after finishing the meal. To put it bluntly, the core logic is just one: you have endured all the hardships, so don’t let your already exhausted body suffer additional sins because of your greed.