I need to get over my roadblock !

  • Hey fellow viewers! I have just started my weight loss journey, but I am having trouble with eating at night :/ Any suggestions?
  • I plan for an evening snack of about 100 calories and then have a cup of hot green tea. It takes a while to drink the tea while it's cooling down but I love it. It makes the perfect end to hopefully an on-plan day. Hope that helps!
  • I brush my teeth when I start to crave at night. The minty taste discourages me from eating anything else. Give it a try!
  • Are you getting adequate nutrition during the day? Enough fat, protein, carbs and calories? Are your meals delicious and satisfying? Are you drinking enough water?

    And what are your evening activities? Are you vegging out on the couch with the tv or laptop? Are you engaged in an activity you love like knitting or sewing or reading or writing or creating something? One of those will lead to boredom and hunger, the other will remove you from thinking about food at all unless you are genuinely hungry.

    I find that if I've eaten well during the day and have an activity at night that engages me I don't do the mindless eating that got me where I was and still am.
  • First step is figuring out whether you're eating because of hunger or boredom/habit.

    Once you figure that out there are lots of strategies for either. You've already gotten good suggestions.

    Sometimes just setting a rule like no eating after a certain time can help. You could start or join a challenge thread and post your progress, for me telling other people how I'm doing makes me do a little better.

    Keeping track of what I'm eating has helped me stop some of my snacking, reading the food labels and marking down everything makes me pay more attention to what I'm eating, some call it mindful eating, really paying attention to what you're consuming.

    Best of luck to you
  • I am more of a nightowl anyway, and have bouts of insomnia here and there. This has been a challenge for my diet, since I'm not asleep by 10pm, for example. Often I am awake for several hours longer. I have a snack every day after dinner, although the time I eat it varies. I work retail a couple of nights per week which means on those nights I don't get home until 11pm or so. I plan a small snack to eat while I unwind.

    I have several go-to late(r) night snacks: 100 cal of plain almonds, chopped celery w/PB2, a half serving or one serving of Special K cracker chips, a half serving (for me) of chips and salsa, a few mini size tootsie rolls if I have a sweet tooth, stuff like that. You can see that some of those snacks have nutritional merit and some don't. On better will-power days, I reach for the snacks with nutritional merit, lol. I am obviously a work in progress.

    A big adjustment I had to make in my diet life was learning how to be a gamer late at night without eating snack food mindlessly. It amazed me how much I was consuming at the computer on a nightly basis when I actually started paying attention to what I was eating.
  • I am a night owl too and totally don't like eating in the morning. I had been having a huge salad at lunch along with lean protein. It was taking ne too long to eat that on my lunch break. Now I have a few veggies with the protein at lunch and have the big salad later in the evening. I never thought of eating the salad as an evening snack before but am surprised I enjoy it then.
  • I used to have this problem big time. I even had an issue where I would wake up to pee in the middle of the night and, while more than half asleep, I'd go and chow down on something in the kitchen. I often didn't even remember doing it until much later in the day.

    What helped me was making sure I ate enough during the day, and also moving my last meal later at night. I had dinner at 9pm for months because it kept me from snacking too much at night. It also killed my nighttime wanderings.