Ep 49 - 5 Habits to Eliminate Night Eating.

January 16,2025

Today let’s tackle a challenge so many struggle with: nighttime eating.

Whether you’re overeating after dinner or find yourself snacking out of habit or boredom, I’ll give you actionable tips to help you break the binge cycle.

You’ll learn..

• Why nighttime eating happens (it’s not just about willpower)

• The biological, emotional, and habitual triggers behind nighttime overeating

• 5 simple habits to stop eating at night and start building healthier routines

TRANSCRIPT:

 Before we get into today's episode, I want you to know that this Tuesday, January 21st at 6pm Mountain Standard Time, I have a new free training for you on Mastering Moderation, where I'm going to teach you how to eat just one piece of chocolate. You're going to learn why the 80 percent healthy, 20 percent not so healthy rule doesn't really work, Three reasons why you feel stuck with overeating and my proven six step method to include all of your favorite foods and eat them in moderation.

Go to the show notes to make sure you register. The replay will be available for very limited time only, so make sure you register now.

 Hey, confident eaters, how are you doing? How is your new year going? We are going to be tackling a really common obstacle that comes up for so many people, which is nighttime eating. So we're going to talk about why nighttime eating happens. How Five actionable daily habits that you can start implementing today to stop nighttime eating and how to move forward from it.

Now, I first want to start this episode by saying, nighttime eating in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. There's nothing wrong about eating at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 p. m. at night or beyond that for that matter. But, We're gonna be talking about what to do if you're overeating at night time and why this time of day can be a little bit more difficult.

Plenty of normal natural eaters out there though around the world eat at night and they're not gaining weight instantly, they're not ruining their metabolism, like all of these things that you've heard about nighttime eating, you really want to question, are they true? Because most of them are probably not.

You can definitely eat at night if that's the time of day that you love eating, if it's the most convenient for you. If you have a job that is just super stressful all day, maybe you're a nurse or a doctor, those are people that I've worked with, they generally have more of their meals later in the day and that is totally okay.

But we're going to address what to do if you're overeating at night and snacking when you're not hungry. Because here's the thing, we don't need to eat that much before we are just laying in bed all night sleeping and doing nothing. Okay, we do not need that much energy, that many calories to get through our night of rest.

And if we are overly full, that can have a major impact on our sleep quality. We sleep so much worse when we overeat. And so if you're noticing, Man, I just get home from work and I just eat and eat and eat until I'm overly full and then I go to bed and I don't sleep as well and then I don't feel good the next day because my blood sugar is all thrown off. This is going to be the episode for you.

So first let's understand why night time overeating, night time binge eating even happens. One of the biggest causes I see for it is skipping meals or undereating during the day. Look, I get we are busy, but to the best of your ability, we need to try to get into some sort of regular meal schedule.

Why this is a problem is because if our body gets to the end of the day and it checks in and it says How many calories have I had today? And it's like, hmm, well, we've had an iced coffee with creamer, we've had a protein bar, and we've had an apple and a few nuts. And it's like, okay, that's like 400 calories that we've had today.

It's going to try to help you, as our lovely brain does, and it's going to send out urges to eat a lot of food, right? So it's interpreting your day as there must have been some sort of famine throughout the day. There must have not been enough food in our local area to be eating. Although that's not true, that's how our survival brain works.

And so it's going to say, hey, now that you're home and there's all this food around, let's make sure we eat. So I call these biological urges. Biological urges are really hard to fight. Because they are biological. They are our body and brain's way of trying to keep us alive. Okay. So if you are skipping breakfast, skipping lunch or you're just having like the tiniest little mini meals throughout the day, and you feel like I just get to the nighttime and just eat and eat and eat, that is a totally normal response for your body to have.

The second thing that might be happening is these emotional triggers. So maybe you are lonely at night. If you live alone, maybe this is the first time you were alone all day and that can trigger some feelings of sadness because you're alone. Maybe you get bored at night, you just don't really know what to do. Maybe you're really stressed and you finally feel like once you get home you can get that stress relief in.

So you might not have very many  tools or skills to handle these emotions right now.  Most people don't this is not your fault. It's just not something we're taught in life of well What do we do to handle these emotions?

So if this is you I recommend listening to episode 45 It's called the number one skill you need to stop emotional eating go listen to that because yes, we can find solutions to these emotions and we can do things to get out of them. But sometimes we just need to learn how to sit with them. Some nights you're just going to be lonely. Loneliness is a part of being human. I feel lonely sometimes, but I don't go to food anymore because I've learned to just sit with that emotion of loneliness and tell myself this is a normal part of life.

Now you might have a habitual routine or these environmental cues that trigger the overeating at night. If you have been someone who has overeaten every single night for the past couple of years, five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, your brain is going to expect that that routine is going to come every night now. You have trained your brain to expect this habit. And because our brain likes to run on autopilot to save energy, it just keeps suggesting this over and over and over again.

So you've created a habitual routine around eating at night. Even if you feel like you're eating plenty of food throughout the day, you're really not hungry when you get to night. If you feel like by just keep eating, it's probably become a habit. You also might have these environmental cues. So if you've tied in this habit with something like watching TV and you snack while you watch TV, now every time you sit on down on the couch, you grab the remote, you turn the TV on, your brain says, wait a minute, where's our snacks? Where's our food? Because it's become so ingrained into that routine.

Then finally, At the end of the day, we're just tired. We feel fatigued. You might have decision fatigue after going throughout the day, doing, doing, doing, having to make these decisions. Our brain does not have that same willpower that it does in the beginning of the day.

So if you are trying to wipe willpower and white knuckle your way through these nighttime urges, it's probably not going to work because that willpower has been depleted. Your brain is tired.  So you're gonna need solutions that don't rely on willpower and just saying don't do it, don't do it, don't do it in order to get through this.

But you need to know that this habit of nighttime eating, it is changeable. I used to binge eat and overeat at night too but honestly, I would do it at all times of the day. It didn't matter if it was 9 a. m. for me or 9 p. m. I would still binge, but our brains are neuroplastic, meaning they can change.

The modern research shows our brain can change  infinitely more times faster than we ever imagined, and that's true for you too. I can do it, so can you.

So I know how common it is for dinner to end and the snacking to just keep going until it's time for bed or you're too full to eat anymore. This would happen to me so many times and so many nights, but I overeat anymore at night. I actually rarely eat at night. I do do a lot of my working out at nighttime now because I just work all day long. But if I eat at night, I just have like a snack, like I have a protein shake and I just move on. There's no urges, there's no cravings. Those things have been deconditioned from my brain.

All right, let's get into the five daily habits that you can start to incorporate to help you stop nighttime binge eating.

The first one I want you to do is to start the day with a balanced breakfast. We always start by looking at earlier in the day. Whenever someone comes to me and says, I'm overeating at night, I just get such strong urges.

I say, what is your eating look like earlier in the day? Because that's going to contribute a lot to how our brain and body are reacting at nighttime.

So why this matters is when we don't start our day with a balanced breakfast, if we're just one eating something carby that's going to cause your blood sugar to go all wacky throughout the day. But if we're also just eating something small you just grab a couple nuts out the door or a small protein bar, that's going to make it so your body's not quite getting the nutrition that it might need that early in the day. Now if you're saying, I just don't get hungry that early in the morning,  that could be because your hunger and fullness signals are just thrown out of whack from the constant overeating and restricting and then binge eating and then, Mildly eating and then going back to restriction.

So it really does throw off those signals. And that's something I work on with clients in my Confident Eater program is focusing on how can we start to regulate these signals and what works best for you to make sure we are eating in a way that's going to prevent these biological urges.  I was just coaching in my Confident Eater group program, and one woman I was sharing how she's been intermittent fasting for the last couple of years, for so long, and she was having a really hard time letting go of the idea that she shouldn't be eating breakfast, and so we coached on it We worked on it, and now that she started including a balanced breakfast now She's having eggs and toast and fruit in the morning She has seen a drastic decrease in her afternoon eating and so once we removed her fears around adding that back in She actually reduced her overall calorie intake and overeating a ton.

So, what I want you to do is look at including protein, fats, and fiber, and carbs into your morning. All four of those things. So, what that can look like. You can have eggs with avocado and toast. I love oatmeal with protein powder. I just mix it in and then I add fruit and usually nut butter or I also love yogurt and fruit and nut butter. Doing something that's actually fulfilling.

Don't just have like one hard boiled egg. Don't just have like an apple. Have something that's actually nourishing and just wait and see what happens.

Along with that, the second thing I want you to do is schedule in regular meals throughout the day. The majority of people that come to me are eating way too small of meals during the day.

If your meals look like, I'm having a banana out the door with a protein bar and then I have a salad with plain chicken and low fat dressing for lunch and I don't eat anything else until dinner, that for most people is not enough. I used to have this rule in my head that all my meals needed to be under 450 calories.

And by the end of the day, I might have had some hunger, but even if I didn't feel super hungry, I just had these intense cravings for food. All I wanted was to eat. And I'd also have a lot more sugar cravings. So if you are also having something, like you just feel like you crave carbs and bread and sugar and candy and chocolate all day long, check in and make sure you are having regular meals, breakfast, lunch, maybe a snack and dinner, and that you're actually getting enough food during those.  Now, don't use this as what you should do, because I don't count calories anymore, and all of our bodies are unique, but if I had to guess, my breakfast and lunches are now around 600 to 700 calories, maybe even 800 calories each, maybe 500 calories a day. I don't really know, but they're definitely more than that 450 calories.

And now my meals, they last me to my next meal. I don't need to snack. I sometimes on occasion need one, but it's just not that big of a deal anymore. I have my breakfast, it lasts me all the way to lunch, I have my lunch, it lasts me all the way to dinner, I have my dinner, and then I feel done for the night. I don't feel like I need to keep eating anymore.

So having these regular meals throughout the day is going to help prevent that extreme hunger that can lead to overeating at night.

And again, if you're in the category where you feel like I just don't even get hungry that much throughout the day. If you are overeating and binge eating right now, your hunger and fullness signals aren't probably that reliable. Which is why in my Confident Eater program, I don't actually teach hunger and fullness until month four because there's so much we need to do before then to start to regulate out your hunger hormones before we start intuitively listening to them.

But if you feel like you start eating at night, and you've awoken this hunger monster, and then all of a sudden you want to eat everything in sight, that's probably a good sign that you need to be eating more earlier in the day.

So I would create a consistent meal plan with yourself, with three meals, probably a snack if you need it in the afternoon or morning, spaced evenly throughout the day, okay?

The third habit you're going to implement is emptying out your stress bucket throughout the day.

All day long, you are having these little things happen. Your kid throws a tantrum at 7am, you're late to work and then your boss is mad at you, you get a new project, you feel overwhelmed, you start to scroll the news on your phone and you see something horrible, you feel triggered about it. Then you get off of work to this huge pile of dishes that needs to be done.

All of these things add up throughout the day. I want you to think about As if there were a leak in a pipe and that leaky pipe is just dripping into this bucket and Every time it drips if something is happening throughout the day the more that flows in the more that's dripping out if you are Not taking time to empty out that stress bucket. It's gonna overflow and it's gonna feel unmanageable.

So, if you are not doing anything to take care of yourself throughout the day, no wonder you get to the end of the day at night and you just feel like, I need to eat to do something to relieve all the stress. So, the key to making sure you're not super stressed at night is to work backwards again and look at what's happening earlier in the day.

How can we empty out this bucket?

We want to make sure it doesn't feel like you've been run over by a truck by 7pm. So think about it as micro self care moments. I am not going to tell you to take an hour in the middle of your day to go to a meditation class. If you can, that's great. But I want you to think about them as micro self care moments.

Sometimes all we need is literally 15 seconds to close our eyes, take a couple deep breaths, and that will make a world of difference and how the rest of your day goes. Maybe you step outside for a few minutes.

When I am scheduling in my day, the first thing I schedule in is my breaks. I don't wait till I have everything else put in the calendar and say, hmm, where's room for me now? I say, no, where do I normally need a break? And making sure that gets in first. I know I need a break in between when I start work and I have lunch. So I usually schedule in a mid morning break. And then at lunch, I always schedule in enough time to have a walk with my lunch. And then same thing in the middle of my day.

I know between lunch and when I finish up work, I need a break somewhere in there. So I am doing physical therapy right now. So I might schedule 20 minutes to take a break and just do my physical therapy. Get my body moving. Doing something active or just stepping outside, feeling the sunshine on my face. Feeling the cold air in my face this time of year? And that wakes me up enough too to keep going.

Sometimes it's just drinking a big glass of water to refresh yourself, refuel yourself, maybe journaling, or I love voice noting too. If you're in your car on your way home, just taking a minute, Find the voice note app on your phone, the audio recording one, and you can just tap it and just like let it out. Pretend like you're talking to a friend, or of course you can call a friend. But sometimes if you just want to rant, just like speaking it out can be so helpful. So taking these mini micro self care moments to help empty out your bucket throughout the day.

Your fourth habit is to get a freaking life. Okay, food and dieting should not be your only hobby, but for so many of us it is. We've spent so many of our years of our life wasted on obsessing over food, and what to eat, and how much to eat, and when to eat, and should I eat this? Should I not eat this? What's the new diet? What's the new book I should read? What's the new podcast I should find? Okay, call it good. Listen to my podcast. And that's it. And then the rest of your time, I want you to find another hobby. Because if you feel like your evenings are just dinner and then a blank space of nothingness, you're going to want to change that. Otherwise, it makes sense why you're overeating. You have nothing else to do. You don't have a life outside of food.

So you can take five minutes, do a little Google search on some fun hobbies you can start, or I'll give you some ideas of my favorites right now of how I spend my evenings.

One thing I have started learning is piano. We have a piano at home that I have never really learned how to play and I decided let's pick it up. So I'm using this app, it's called Simply Piano, and now that I'm thinking about it, they have Simply drawing too. They also have simply singing and simply guitar. I think that's all the simply apps, but they basically are like duolingo for learning piano, drawing, singing, guitar. So it's a super fun app.

It's really awesome to teach you if you want to learn one of those skills. I also, I am really into pole classes and aerial fitness. And so I spend a lot of my evenings going to classes, fitness classes. So maybe you find a fun, boutique y fitness studio. I am really biased and I think pole dancing is the most fun thing in the entire world and I think everyone should try it.

You honestly do not have to be as strong as you imagine. Find one in your area. It makes you feel so empowered. So sexy. You have so much fun You are in a community of other people. So I love that but maybe you sign up for yoga class a cycle class, Pilates class a CrossFit class like there's so many fine fitness things out there.

And I find scheduling in the class really helps get you motivated because then when I'm sitting on the couch and it's 6 p. m. and I finish my dinner and I don't want to do anything, but too bad I have a class scheduled, I have to get my booty up and go to that class.

You can find a fun craft to do. Look up different craft ideas. Find something that you want to get into. Maybe you get into reading. And if you're someone who's like me, Who tries to force himself to only read nonfiction and self help books for the name of learning. Find a fiction book that you love. Okay, I'm into Romanticy.  if you haven't heard of A Court of Thorn and Roses, would highly recommend that series. I'm also reading, I just got done with the Fourth Wing series right now. I am really deep in diving into the Romanticy world and it is a big world to explore. So I've been spending a lot of my time reading.

Reading. I also love a good Colleen Hoover book. Like something that's romantic, but really fast paced. Like I would much rather spend my night reading a book than eating food now.

Maybe you find a pottery class or a sewing class. Like there's these artsy classes out there. Just find something to do other than eat.

Okay, and I know it can be tiring at night. Sometimes it can feel like you just want to lay on the couch and  so hard to get off your butt after a long day, but I promise you, you probably have so much more energy in the evenings than you imagine. Like once I get up off the couch, I'm like, wait a second, like I'm wide awake. You know when you get that second wind? Sometimes we just need to find something that brings us joy and lights us up. So find what that can be for you.

Now you might still have to give yourself that little push of getting over that initial hump of getting started at this activity. But once you do it, everything in your night will go so much better.

And so many of us, if we don't eat the food, we just spend the rest of our night scrolling on our phones. Which like, how do you want to spend your life like honestly when you look back at the end of your life Do you want to be like I spent a third of my day at night just eating and scrolling on my phone like no life Is so much better than that and I don't care that it's the middle of winter right now and it's dark You can still get up once you get up You will start having fun, and you can make your evenings something that's worthwhile.

Okay, the fifth habit that you need to create is some sort of evening and bedtime routine. Now this can be a routine that is long, as in the second I get home from work, I start my routine. Or this could be just one hour before bedtime, I set an alarm to start doing my bedtime routine.

This will solve the issue of when you are done eating dinner and you're just like pitter pattering around. You don't really know what to do, so you start opening the cabinets, looking for some food. Okay, maybe I'll start having this. I still don't know what to do, so I'm going to snack a little more. Oh, let's turn on the TV. Now I want some popcorn. I'm going to make some popcorn. Like, that is because you have no structure and routine.

The truth is though, you probably do have some sort of routine right now. You have the nighttime eating routine. It's just not helpful and it includes extra food that you don't need.

So you want to take your current routine and evaluate it.

Look at what is my current routine?

What am I doing? What do I like about it?

What do I not like?

And what do I want to change?

What would be my ideal routine instead?

Now I recommend mixing it up a little to break out of the habit. So right now, if your evening routine is kind of, as I mentioned, you eat dinner and then you're pitter pattering around watching tv until you get tired enough that you go wash your face and go to bed, maybe you want to mix it up a little.

So, maybe you make your dinner, you vow to clean up the dishes after, and then you go upstairs for a second and you wash your face then. Just that little mix up alone can be enough to break our brain out of this automatic routine that we're in.

Or maybe instead of watching the TV on the couch downstairs, you watch it upstairs in your bedroom. Or, as I mentioned, you do one of these new things, these new activities, and you actually get out of the house. That would be the easiest way to break up this habit. So you really Can interrupt this brain pathway of do XYZ every night.

Now start small here If you don't have a very big bedtime routine and you're like, alright I'm gonna write this full two hour routine of how I want to be that's probably not gonna happen So just choose one thing to add in or switch out.

So maybe you start Having tea after dinner or you put a mint in your mouth or you decide to go to bed 10 minutes earlier. So you set an alarm to make sure to remind you to go get ready for bed. Maybe you decide to read. So you put a book on your couch and then it's ready for you to go right when you sit down on the couch.

I love taking a bath. I am a big bath lover. Lady, I feel like I'm like nine years old sometimes, but I love a good bath Like I use the fancy bath bombs for lush. I use Epsom salts I put lavender essential oil in them like they are so fun And then I put on classical music and I just listen to it and I just breathe, I now have a lovely Kindle So I'm gonna be bringing my Kindle in my bath with me and reading there And doing all these things is just going to help you to break this association between nighttime equals eating.

Okay, I want you to be prepared though, that if this is a habit that you have formed for many, many, many years of nighttime eating, do not be surprised if the urge to eat comes up. Your brain is made to do habits. And so it is likely going to tell you, hey, so and so, Every night at 7 p. m. you normally eat this food. Do you want to do this again? It's going to offer you that suggestion. Just because you go through these things These five habits does not mean that it's going to eliminate the urge. How we eliminate the urge is we have the urge come up and we don't act on it. That's what rewires our brain.

So if you start craving this food, what I want you to do is make sure you are using my free guided urge audio. If you have not downloaded this yet, it is in the show notes. This urge audio is something that you don't need to use willpower for, but you can just pop in your ears. So maybe you want to take your headphones and put them in your kitchen so you can listen to this urge audio if you live with someone. Or maybe you just put a sticky note in your kitchen saying, listen to the urge audio and it will walk you through how to visualize the results you want, which is getting through your night without overeating.

So make sure you have that downloaded on your phone, ready to go for when these cravings are inevitably going to come up so you can stop them and you can do these new habits.

Now, to recap of these five habits. The first one is to start your day with a balanced breakfast. Second, you're going to schedule in regular meals. Third, you're going to empty your stress bucket throughout the day. Four, get yourself a life outside of food, a new hobby. And five, you're going to create an evening and bedtime routine.

I want you to pick just one of these to start and implement. If you have been listening to this podcast but not taking action, this is your sign to actually take action.

Information is not going to change anything. You can listen to this podcast all day long, forever and ever, but until you start taking action nothing is going to change. And if you're having trouble with this, this is what I help you do in my ConfidentEater program. But for now, just choose one, and then once you've started implementing that, getting data on it, noticing how it's working, then you can move on to the next habit.

Because small, consistent changes are what are going to lead to lasting results.