I think the term "caloric deficit" is so very lose. There are so many factors that can accout for you being in a caloric deficit that its not as clear cut to judge when you will or wont be.
I was on a diet eating mainly lean meats, brown rice, oats and whey which made up around 95% of my daily intake hitting an average of 2200-2300 calories per day. I gained weight. 14lb in 3 months.
I changed to a carb cycling diet, and adjusted the way my body behaved towards the food that I was putting in to it and was losing weight on 2500 cals per day.
I now average 2900ish cals per day over a week, eating 3 nights a week in excess of 375g of carbs all after 5pm, and have gained 8lb in 4 months.
According to my old diet i needed to be eating less then 2k to be in a caloric deficit. According to my new diet i need to be eating less then 2.5k cals per day to be in a caloric deficit. My activity levels have not changed, how my diet is structured and when i eat certain food types have.
In theory my caloric requirements should be the same. They are not, mainly based on when and how i eat as apposed to the calorie amount it am eating.
More likely, your metabolism has increased for two reasons:
Firstly, the increase in body weight. Higher the weight, higher the basal metabolic rate and also the more you burn from activity.
Secondly, when you had to eat below 2000 to lose weight, you may have been suffering from the adaptive component to dieting. When bodyfat gets on the low side, the body resists further fat loss (through a number of hormonal mechanisms) and accomplishes this by a down regulation in energy expenditure.
Thirdly, your calorie counting may have improved; your intake may well have been slightly greater than you thought previously. But with increasing dietary awareness and structuring, you acquired a better grasp of it.
Please don't take this as me totally rubbishing what you've posted here. I'm always very curious about the whole concept of meal timings having an effect on overall metabolic rate. But I'm convinced that any effect it may have would be minimal at best.
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On topic of nighttime carbs and fat storage, everybody rubbished the bro science put forward earlier in the thread, and rightly so.
I'd like to add to that the point that carbohydrates, in a literal sense, are almost NEVER converted to fat at all. The mechanism by which carbs are converted to fat is called
de novo lipogenesis. This only happens in extreme circumstances, e.g. many days worth of consuming insane amounts of carbs (700-900g) equaling one's entire daily energy expenditure, and also in situations where dietary fat consumption is chronically low (10% or less of total calories).
That's not to say that carbohydrates in a calorie surplus do not "make you fat", but this is due to another reason: namely, that the body preferentially spends its time burning carbs, so fat oxidation is decreased. Therefore, on a surplus the body will end up storing some dietary fat as body fat. In that case, you get fat on carbs through an INDIRECT mechanism.
On a high fat low carb diet, the body spends most its time burning fat. But any fat calories in excess of your maintenance rate will not be burned off, so are available to be stored DIRECTLY as body fat.
One way or another, you STILL get fat. But almost never because carbs themselves are being stored as or converted to fat.
As does the article really - insulin is a great hormone, but one that doesn't deserve to be caned by eating ****. Also, whilst I LOVE dairy - I still think keeping it to a smaller amount is generally better. However, that's a whole different argument/story - this is just about insulin. 