There are several problems with snacking at night. Aside from the obvious one that you're probably not eating because you're hungry, there's another issue that our body needs time to digest food and it prefers to do that during the day. Overnight, our body goes into repair mode and does all the housekeeping tasks that keep us healthy and out of hospital.
So if you're in the habit of snacking at night, what can you do to reduce or eliminate that?
The obvious tip is to reduce or even eliminate the snacks from your house.
And, in an ideal world, that helps enormously.
But most of us don't live in an ideal world.
Husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, children and seemingly anyone else often share your home. And they often have different aims on their idea of what food should be in the house.
Which means that even if you're aiming to be good, there's often still tempting food within easy reach.
Which in turn means that you'll get tempted. After all, you're only human.
Drinking lots of water can help. It fills up your stomach and reduces the hunger pangs that often trigger late night snack attacks.
I find that keeping a glass of water near my desk or chair helps a lot. Keep sipping it throughout the day and it helps to keep your snacking tendencies more in control.
The next thing to realise is that you're highly unlikely to be perfect, especially at first.
It's only human nature to stray occasionally. And, unless you're a saint, the chances are that you'll occasionally lapse and have a snack later at night than you intended.
The thing to remember if this happens is that it's not the end of the world. It doesn't mean that you have failed forever. It just means that you've lapsed today, this minute.
So do your best not to use a single lapse as an excuse to wolf down that whole chocolate cake or tub of ice cream!
Accept that you've had one (or even more than one) snack but that you can stop now.
And don't use this as an excuse to pig out for the next week as well. A lapse on one day is just that - a temporary bump on your journey - not an excuse to carry on snacking at night as though you'd never tried to stop snacking at that time of day.
