- After a long day at work, do you plop down on the sofa and spend the rest of the evening in front of the TV eating until you go to bed?
- Do you have trouble sleeping?
- Do you restrict food, diet during the day, or skip meals, only to come home and eat whatever’s available? Then, feeling guilty about your poor food choices, do you continue to eat to drown out the guilt?
- Are you a poor meal planner? Do you often have very little in the house to make a healthy meal with so you tend to eat bits of this and that, eat in front of the refrigerator, eat food right out of the jar, or standing up with little awareness you’re doing so?
- When you cook, do you taste and snack so much before the meal that you’re no longer hungry when it’s time to eat?
- Do you get up in the middle of the night and eat whatever you find in the refrigerator?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, you may suffer from Night Eating Syndrome (NES).
Night Eating Syndrome is a source of unwanted weight gain for many people. The most important thing you can do is to try to identify the trigger or triggers that set it off and eliminate or find better ways to deal with them.
Here are 7 Tips to Deal with Night Eating
1. Make sure you eat regular meals and snacks throughout the day. Don’t skip meals.
2. If mindless munching after dinner is the problem, designate in advance what you will snack on in the evening, and put it on a plate. After you’ve had your snack, make the kitchen off limits in the evening.
3. If you do keep getting up to look for food, make yourself some herb tea sweetened with stevia. Just the act of making something, having something in your hand, and having something to sip on while you watch TV or cook will keep you busy.