The early bird may get the worm, but it looks like the night owl gets not only the worm but several super-sized meals at McDonald’s, a healthy serving of mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, several boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mints cookies, and everything in Paula Dean’s kitchen too. Not to mention a half gallon of Häagen-Dazs. Or so you’d assume looking at the average sex tourist out on a late-night prowl in Thailand. It’s not just that those who prefer sleeping all day and staying up late into the night often have a weight problem, but that they often can’t wait for their next meal too. In this case it’s not a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, ‘cuz that blimpoid that stayed up into the early hours of the morning ate both of them. With a side of fries.

Is it their lifestyle that results in the packed on poundage, or that their prodigious mounds of body fat are best not viewed in the light of the day? Does being a creature of the night automatically mean your size is not included in those covered by one size fits all t-shirts? If you’ve adopted the nocturnal lifestyle of a blood sucker, does that doom you to a life of having to suck it in?

Yup, smells like science to me.

New research out of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago says that old Ben Franklin was onto something. He just had the prize wrong. It’s not about the early bird getting the worm but rather those who rise with the sun tend to have a significantly lower body mass index (BMI) than those who opt for making their appearance later in the day. The bastards.

Researchers found early rays keep off the pounds as people exposed to earlier sunlight are leaner than those who seldom come out until after dark. The study says the timing, intensity and duration of light exposure during the day is linked to weight – the first time this has been shown. According to the research, which plotted weight gain of 54 subjects – 26 men and 28 women – people who had most of their daily exposure to even moderately bright light in the morning had a significantly lower body mass index (BMI) than those who spent those hours in bed.

Doctor Kathryn Reid, research associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University, says her study shows that the later the hour of moderately bright light a person is exposed to, the higher a person’s BMI will be, and the influence of morning light exposure on body weight is independent of a person’s physical activity level, calorie intake, amount of sleep, or age.

Co-study author Doctor Phyllis Zee says, “The message is that you should get more bright light between 8am and noon.” Her and Dr. Reid’s research shows that light exposure accounts for about 20 per cent of a person’s BMI. Dr. Zee says that about 20 to 30 minutes of morning light is enough to affect BMI. Which is good news. ‘Cuz that’s just about enough time to get an Egg McMuffin, or four, and then go back to bed.

Dr Zee added: ‘We focused on how bad it is to not to get enough light at the appropriate time during the day through normalization of the timing of the sleep-wake cycle relative to light exposure, as defined by clock time which may be quite different than some individual’s “biological morning”. She also noted that there was also no association in this study between sleep duration and BMI, and that sleep restricted to 5 hours per night paired with light exposure in the morning still resulted in reductions in body fat.

So if your mirror is starting to snicker at your reflection, according to the good doctors’ work, you can still spend your nights trolling through the bars of Pattaya, you just need to get up early the next morning and catch some sun. Even if that means spending a few of those hours grazing your hotel’s free buffet breakfast.

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