Chances are most of us have experienced jet lag, the unpleasant effect of crossing multiple time zones in a relatively short amount of time (say, an eight-hour flight that catapults your body six hours into the future). Jet lag can take days to overcome, and in the meantime it can be harder to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. To put it simply, our body clocks are confused. 

Eating jet lag is a similar idea, says Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, the director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep & Circadian Research at Columbia University and the author of Eat Better, Sleep Better. But, unlike traditional jet lag, this version doesn’t require any traveling at all. St-Onge explains what eating jet lag is, why it’s detrimental, and how to recover faster if you can’t avoid it.

What Is Eating Jet Lag?

“Eating jet lag is the result of shifting our eating schedule off of our typical pattern,” says St-Onge. While eating jet lag can happen anytime, it’s most common on weekends, when people have more freedom to deviate from their usual routine. 

For example, say Monday through Thursday you have dinner around 7 p.m., go to bed around 11 p.m., and eat breakfast the following day at 7 a.m. But on Fridays, you meet up with friends for drinks, have a late dinner around 9 p.m., make a night of it, and tumble into bed around 1 a.m. After sleeping in on Saturday morning, you skip breakfast and eat brunch around 11. Dinner is another late-night affair, and you binge-watch that new TV show everyone is talking about until 2 a.m. It’s fine because tomorrow is Sunday and you can sleep in, right? Breakfast happens at 10 a.m., then the Sunday scaries keep you up until midnight. When you finally drag yourself out of bed Monday morning, a 7 a.m. breakfast has no appeal.

So even though you haven’t traveled anywhere in this example, your internal body clock tied to eating and sleeping is out of whack. That’s eating jet lag. “It’s analogous to going across time zones, and that’s hard on your body,” says St-Onge. Amazingly, even shifting your schedule just one hour can have negative effects, she notes.

How Eating Jet Lag Is Unhealthy

Consistent shifts in meal times between days is associated with several negative health effects, says St-Onge. The likely culprit is the disruption of our innate circadian system, our 24-hour internal clock. That system has evolved to process food earlier in the day, and when we shift meals or snacks to later in the day or vary meal times across days on a semi-regular basis, it can lead to a variety of problems.

One is increased chronic inflammation. In a study St-Onge co-authored in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, researchers found that each additional 30-minute difference in weekday-weekend eating end time was related to a 13% increase in hsCRP, or high-sensitive C-reactive protein. Higher levels of hsCRP indicate increased systemic inflammation and are tied to a higher risk of heart attacks.

Eating jet lag can also increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes, says St-Onge. “since insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, fat synthesis, and oxidation are all regulated by our circadian clock and occur optimally earlier in the day.”

Eating jet lag can also affect your sleep quality if it means you’re eating closer to bedtime, say within two or three hours of your head hitting the pillow. “If you think about the time it takes for digestion and processing of food, you’d want to have food out of your esophagus and stomach as much as possible before bedtime for better sleep.” Poor sleep is tied to a host of negative health outcomes.

When Eating Jet Lag Is a Problem

St-Onge notes that shifting your eating schedule becomes problematic when it’s a regular occurrence. “The patterns that we observe as being associated with worse outcomes are those reported as being usual habits. If, for example, someone has overall regular eating habits and one day eats out of alignment and returns to stable patterns for most of the time, then this will not mean they will have increased their risk of disease.” So don’t sweat the occasional late night or “lost weekend.”

How to Bounce Back Faster From Eating Jet Lag

The simplest way to avoid eating jet lag is to stick to your regular eating and sleep schedules as much as possible, even on the weekends, “so your lifestyle behaviors match your biology,” says St-Onge.

But for those times when your eating schedule is impacted, the best thing to do is to nudge yourself back on track as soon as possible. So in our example above, if you wake up at your usual time on Monday, but don’t feel like eating, still try to consume a healthy breakfast at your usual hour so you can continue on with lunch, dinner, and then bedtime at your typical cadence.

As for what to eat to speed up feeling better, St-Onge recommends pairing complex carbohydrates, meaning high-fiber carbs, with foods rich in the amino acid tryptophan. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and tryptophan helps in the production of serotonin and melatonin, a neurotransmitter and hormone, respectively, that help regulate the circadian system. Tryptophan-rich foods include tofu, beef, chicken, edamame, turkey, oats, pepitas, and brown rice. (Savory breakfast for the win!) But, don’t worry, you won’t get sleepy from eating tryptophan-rich foods in the morning. It takes your body time to process it, and St-Onge recommends eating tryptophan throughout the day, every day for better sleep.