I don't know if it has ever been discussed here before... maybe it has and that's where I got this idea... but I was wondering what time everyone's calories for the day started over?
I have always done the whole go to sleep and start at 0 for the day when I wake up, but recently I read about people starting their calories at 5pm or so. So that they can eat their dinner, for however many calories, have a snack or whatever and then go to bed. Then have breakfast and lunch with their remaining calories and restart before dinner time.
It seems to me that that plan would work well for me since I tend to save my calories for dinner. I wonder if it would really make a difference at all since it is the same calories a day anyway?
I work the graveyard shift three nights a week and then work one day shift and kinda live a day shift life on my days off. I go mid-night to mid-night for my calorie counting; which means for three days I'm basically doing what you're suggesting, starting my day's calorie count in the middle of my "day".
I'm not sure how well your plan would work for me if I did it for my days off though. I've never been a huge evening snack person but I do find that knowing I've only got 127 or 56 or even 300 calories left in the day does help me control whatever urges I have to go root around the kitchen looking for something to stuff in my face. If I had 1000 or 1200 still left, even knowing I'd have to get through lunch and breakfast the next day, I might feel less restrained.
I just don't know. But I think it would certainly be worth trying. I think you'd know pretty quickly if it was helpful or a disaster.
I count midnight to midnight as I track on line and it tracks by the date. Also because I'm generally asleep by midnight it works because I have found when I eat after midnight (either can't sleep or out with friends) and eat that late I generally don't end up eating breakfast the "next" morning so makes more sense to put the early hours meal in as breakfast.
I've thought of this issue a lot recently. I record my calories for the whole day through, from waking to sleeping. I'm a bit of an insomniac, so for the few days a month that I don't sleep all night, I stop counting for the day when the sun comes up. It really doesn't matter, as the body reads big-picture, weekly and monthly counts, not individual days. And since I am such a night person, I save the vast majority of my calories for past midnight. My family told me I wouldn't lose weight eating that way, but the weight is flying off and I eat predominately after midnight.
I first heard of "start the counting at dinner" years ago in a Weight Watcher's meeting. I've also worked every shift, including wildly swinging shifts (the shifts were often so random when I worked in a juvenile detention facility and in youth homes, it was a common joke - even though the jobs were in different counties - that the bosses chose the schedule with a dartboard).
When I worked swing shifts it was easiest to choose midnight to midnight. Otherwise, if I worked a steady shift, whether it was days or nights, it usually made the most sense to start the day when I woke up and end it when I went to bed.
I tried the "start at dinner," and it worked fine, but for me it made more sense in my head (because of the way I was used to using my food journal) to use actual days (either midnight to midnight or wakeup to bedtime).
But I have to say that weight loss didn't seem to be affected by when I chose to eat or what I counted as a day.
Calorie reset time?
