I beat late night snacking!

I see a lot of people asking how they can stop snacking at night and I thought that my experience may be helpful to some people, so I'm sharing it. While eating late at night does NOT make you gain weight (for real, I promise!!), for some people doing so can cause them to eat a lot more calories than they intend. Before using MFP, I would eat my too large meals throughout the day and then I would snack from the time dinner ended until I went to bed. This snacking was a HUGE source of my excess calories.

My boyfriend snacks constantly and never seems to gain an ounce. I like to eat when other people eat. So when I started here, I was determined not to give up all of my snacks. So I didn't! I started off by eating small meals throughout the day and saving a bunch of calories until night time so I could continue to snack. I was only eating 1200 calories though, so I would get rather hungry throughout the day.

As I became more educated about nutrition, I kept raising my calorie goal and eating more food with each meal. I began to pay more attention to my macros and less attention to my calorie number (if you meet your macros, you reach your calorie goal anyway but I wanted to make sure I was getting adequate protein, fat and fiber). It became more and more difficult to fit several snacks into my macros and increasingly easy to consume larger meals to meet my macros. In the beginning of doing the IIFYM, I was still determined to keep my snacks but I started to reduce how many I had each day.

I used baby steps by planning my food the night before and allowing myself only a certain number of snacks (no more than 5), then reduced that to no more than 4, etc. Now I usually have one snack after dinner. Depending on how my days go, I may have two. I am slowly getting better at planning to meet my macros and I have learned how to control the main source of my over-eating.