Why Nothing Hits Like a Late-Night Bowl of Cereal

It’s 11:15 p.m. on a Monday. 30 Rock is on the TV, there’s a crushed can of seltzer on the coffee table, and I’m experiencing one of life’s great joys: hammering bowl after delicious bowl of Special K Red Berries.

Well, more specifically, I’m sucking down medically inadvisable amounts of its Trader Joe’s knockoff, Flakes and Strawberries. I’m hunched over my bowl, trying my best not to spill milk on the old Life Is Good T-shirt I have on while simultaneously turning the volume up so I can hear Tina Fey over my thunderous crunching. Thus begins the vicious cycle of finishing my bowl and turning the volume back down because, well, surely that’ll be the last one I have tonight—but it never is. There is no “last bowl.” There is only “running out of milk.” Let me explain.

Growing up, I ate cereal for breakfast just about every day, until wrestling, glorious sport that it is, required me to relegate the sugary loops and puffs of my youth to more of a “treat” classification. They became special occasion foods for eating, say, after a big tournament. So much so that, to this day, my absolute ideal, desert-island dessert wouldn’t be a crème brûlée, tiramisu, or an elaborately constructed croquembouche—it would be a massive bowl of Frosted Flakes. (In fact, just leave me the box and a half gallon of skim, and I’m happy.)

But even though wrestling is many years in the rearview, I would never have cereal for breakfast—and not because I think the cleanup is a lot of work, like many millennials apparently do. I just like to start my day with a ton of protein, ensuring I’m hitting my macros to fuel my weightlifting hobby—which, for me, is around 225 grams, but who’s counting? (For the record, I am counting. Very meticulously.) Cereal as a breakfast food has generally fallen out of fashion for most men I know, specifically my fellow meatheads, who opt for protein-packed smoothies or half a dozen eggs instead of a heaping bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Nor would I have cereal for dinner to cut costs on groceries and appease Big Grain, as the Kellogg’s CEO controversially suggested.

Yet, the masculine urge to inhale oceans of Apple Jacks still hits me night after night—and I’m not alone. With this in mind, cereal brands have even tried to appeal to the midnight crowd in the past (see: Post’s “Sweet Dreams” line, complete with lavender and chamomile flavoring). And with good reason: Practically every dude I know turns to cereal when they’re hungry at night after dinner, including a few of my esteemed GQ colleagues.

“It’s the secret to a big bench,” my friend Kent Tor—who (almost) benches as much as I do—tells me. “And if you’re trying to pack in a few extra calories on a bulk, there’s no easier way to do it than a few bowls of cereal before bed.” As performance chef Dan Churchill explains in this video, high-level athletes also find cereal to be an efficient way to get more calories in too.