At my house, there are five "official" meals: breakfast, lunch, tea (also known as "tea snack" to differentiate it from "making a pot of tea at other times"), dinner, and bedtime snack.
Dinner is the most formal meal — the whole family sits down together at the same time and consumes the same food, with jelly sandwiches for kids who don't like the dinner being put off until afterward. Tea is brief but also formal: I sit down with the children at 3:30 or so, we have tea and milk and cookies and fruit, and I read some stories aloud. Breakfast and lunch are informal; Mark and I have breakfast together, whereas the children eat when they wake up later, and lunch is basically sandwiches-and-carrot-sticks-whenever-you-want, help yourself, the bread and peanut butter is on the counter.
Right in the middle of the formality scale is bedtime snack. It's a key part of the children's bedtime routine. Mark is the gatekeeper and master of bedtime snack. He makes milkshakes, or quesadillas, or apples with peanut butter; he pours cold cereal (almost never used for breakfast in our house) and spoons out yogurt with maple syrup. He decides whether a particular child needs to eat a portion of uneaten dinner before moving on to the "fun" food. And of course, Mark has a snack too; without the peanut butter calories, he'd waste away, I think. (Mark went on a business trip to Italy last week, consumed multi-course multi-hour dinners with lots of wine and a total of ten scoops of ice cream, and lost several pounds.) Surveying what he and the children polish off in that last twenty minutes or so before bed, I think they easily consume as many calories in bedtime snack as they do at lunch or dinner. For this reason, Mark's usually pretty careful to make snacks that, while they may be sweet, are reasonably healthful.
Of course, with everyone else having bedtime snack for the last five years or so, I've been having one too. I don't like sweet stuff as much; cheese and crackers or a turkey sandwich, that's the sort of thing I go for late at night. Healthful stuff! Sometimes I really am at least a little bit hungry, but I think most of the time I'm not; it's just what everyone else is doing.
Some diet people seem to think it's a good idea to have small snacks throughout the day, including right before bed; something about keeping the blood sugar at a stable level. Others think that snacks are the death of a diet. I have been experimenting a little bit with the bedtime snack thing; having a small one, maybe 150 calories, versus having, say, two tall glasses of water and going straight to bed.
Last week, I felt hungry after coming back from my swimming workout, and had some cheese and tomato on a flatbread cracker; I said to Mark, "Maybe it's a good idea to have a snack when I come back from a workout." And I did feel pretty good when I went to bed, and not bad when I got up, either. But last night when I came back from my workout and felt hungry, I decided to skip the snack — I had had a good-sized dinner, it's not like I had to do anything vigorous for the next ten hours, I was going straight to bed — so I drank some water, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. My tummy rumbled gently, but my muscles were tired enough from the swimming that I was glad to drop right off to sleep. I woke up feeling wonderfully light and empty inside, really ready for breakfast.
Having made a few comparisons like this over the last few weeks (in that case, after-workout fasting vs. after-workout snacking), I'm just about ready to quit bedtime snacks for good. I am pretty sure that I feel better when I wake up after a twelve-hour fast than when I wake up after a seven-hour fast. I also seem to be satisfied with a smaller breakfast, at least in the case that I have a light "second breakfast" planned for midmorning.
The ritual of bedtime snack is pretty strong, though, which is a good thing, not bad, since it's a time of family connection. I've been avoiding it by staying busy while Mark's making food for the children, or by whisking MJ up to bed immediately after she finishes hers. I should probably stock up on some herb tea or low-sodium bouillon or something, so I can come back and spend that time with my husband and children, finishing out our day.
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