Hello, this is Monica Reinagel.

Welcome to the Nutrition Divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Are you a lark or an owl?

Larks are those early to bed, early to rise types.

They tend to feel more energized and focused early in the day and they enjoy turning in early.

Owls on the other hand don't really hit their stride until later in the day.

Left to their own devices, they are happy to stay up until the wee hours and then sleep the morning away.

The tendency to be a night owl or an early bird isn't something that we have a lot of control over. Although lifestyle,

culture and habit can certainly play a role in when you get up and when you go to bed,

the tendency toward morningness or eveningness, as it's called in the medical literature,

is largely a genetic predisposition.

Unfortunately for the night owls, our society seems to have been scheduled by the early birds.

Standard school and business hours generally start just a few hours after sunup

and several hours before your typical night owl wants to be up and about.

And as a result, night owls tend to get less sleep than early birds

and they suffer from all of the health risks that go along with that. If you have strong

owl tendencies, arranging your schedule so that you can work later in the day

might make your life a lot easier. However, there are a couple of other things

that you may want to watch out for as well, namely how your sleep patterns can

affect your eating patterns. Not surprisingly, night owls tend to consume more of their calories

later in the day. A night owl, for example, typically eats about 20% of their calories after 8 p.m.

As I talked about in a recent episode, this

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