If you go to bed without having had dinner, you’ll lie awake all night.
“He who goes to bed without supper, tosses and turns all night” means that ‘going to bed without dinner leads to restless, agitated sleep, or sleep filled with thoughts and anxieties.’ “Toss and turn” means to wander, to mutter, to say or think nonsense—like thread that gets tangled when being wound. The proverb warns that nighttime hunger prevents restful sleep and causes restlessness, tossing and turning, or even delirium.
It belongs to the tradition of ‘popular dietary proverbs,’ a widespread genre in Spanish proverbs that links food with health and rest.
Origin: It is a saying from ‘popular Castilian oral tradition,’ of anonymous origin and predating any author who recorded it in writing. It belongs to a set of proverbs about dinner that sometimes contradict each other, reflecting popular wisdom about two opposing dangers—overeating and skipping dinner—as other sayings in the same family show:
“Dinner killed more than Avicenna healed” and “A big dinner never makes for a good night.”
Author (documentary source): The proverb has no identifiable original author—it is a folk saying—but its most cited written source is Juan Sorapán de Rieros (Logrosán, Extremadura, 1572–1638), a Spanish physician and “familiar of the Holy Office” in Granada.
Sorapán included it in his work “Spanish Medicine Contained in Vulgar Proverbs of Our Language,” published in Granada by Martín Fernández Zambrano in 1616. In this treatise, addressed to “philosophers and physicians, theologians and jurists… for the proper maintenance of health and a longer life,” the author not only compiled proverbs but also explained and medically justified them, drawing on the works of Galen, Hippocrates, Avicenna, and Aristotle. For this reason, he is credited as the documentary source of the saying (abbreviated “SR” in paremiological studies), even though he was only the compiler and commentator, not the creator of the proverb.
