After dinner eater

I save calories for an evening snack. If I'm having cookies, I take two or three inn a napkin and put the rest away so I'm not reaching for another.

Are you eating enough the rest of the day? Undereating during the day can lead to binging at night.

If you feel like you enjoy evening snacking or can't avoid it, save calories for it and include foods less calorie dense than cookies (for example, reach for fruit or raw veg or a measured amount of air popped popcorn or whatever).

If there are specific treats that you just have no current control over, talk to your family about switching them out temporarily for ones less tempting for you.

Also, change up habits in other ways to try to stop the current pattern -- maybe prioritize tasks that use your hands and make snacking harder or drink a cup of herbal tea to use your hands, stuff like that.

If you want to stop snacking, make that a priority -- part of which will be using up cals before (so you aren't undereating) and then maybe doing something to signal the end of eating (brushing teeth) or having a hard stop so you can tell yourself "I don't eat after X time" (or I don't eat after dinner, or I don't eat other than my one single snack), "but I will have that with lunch tomorrow!"

You could try eating you’d dinner later?
Or brushing your teeth before bed early so that you have the taste of peppermint in your mouth which makes you crave stuff less plus the hassle of then having to brush your teeth again if you do indulge.
Along similar lines, a peppermint tea may help?
Personally I VERY rarely snack after dinner as I train in the evening after work so by the time I shower & eat it’s around 8.30pm so not long and I’m falling asleep on the sofa then take myself off to bed.
It’s probably a habit thing - could you keep your hands busy by taking up a hobbie so that you’re not reaching for the snacks?

I've been eating dinner later then having air popped popcorn with coconut aminos, smoked paprika, and garlic powder. Then I brush my teeth and make a huge mug of herbal tea, it's my 'wind down' routine.

1. Make sure you aren't undereating. You might be losing control because you are trying to lose too fast and your body is legit hungry.
2. Log a Quick Add of whatever a reasonable calorie snack would be first thing in the morning so you have the best chance of saving those cals.
3. When it's time for your snack, weigh out your portion, remove the quick add and log your food, put the package away, walk somewhere else and eat.
4. If you don't manage to save cals and aren't really hungry, I find a diet soda, or a cup of flavored tea with a square of dark chocolate sometimes satisfies.
5. If the snacking urge is forcing you up to your maintenance calories or even over, take a look at your macros. If you are typically below goal on protein, fat, or fiber, bringing any stragglers up to goal might help control your appetite.
6. Keep busy, boredom eating is a thing.
7. If you think you would do better as an abstainer, focus on a realistic deficit and your macros, then try closing the kitchen after dinner and keeping yourself busy. This really works for some people and really does not work for other people!

A few thoughts, including some long shots (but I'm not the only person here I've seen saying that they helped):

1. Consider experimenting with your all-day eating patterns to see if there are changes that might reduce evening cravings. It could be anything: Bizarrely, one of the things that most helped me with evening cravings was to get a solid breakfast with plenty of protein, then spread more protein through the day.

2. For me, my cravings for calorie-dense but nutrient-sparse sweets were reduced after I made it a point, for a few weeks, to eat several servings of fruit every day. I started with 3 servings, and eventually could reduce that. After a while, some of the simple just-sweet former treat foods (candy, cookies) started seeming too simple and just sweet, not very appealing. (I still enjoy a good rich dessert now and then, though. ).

3. Cravings can be a response to fatigue, thus be more likely to arise late in the day as we get more energetically depleted. How's your sleep? How's your stress level? Is your exercise intensity being managed (i.e., not shooting for high intensity day in/day out, too little recovery, etc.)?

4. If the problem isn't actually some variant of hunger, the answer isn't food. If the issue is habits, it's usually easier to replace an undesired habit with a new, better one, rather than trying to "just stop". If the issue is boredom, the answer is probably a good distraction. There are various non-food solutions to these, but IMO some particularly good ones are new or revived hobbies, especially ones that require clean hands (needlework, sketching, playing a musical instrument, etc.) or create dirty hands (painting, gardening, carpentry, etc.).

Best wishes!

I dont eat before 2pm so that I have calories left for after dinner.

I have similar issues so this is what worked for me. I am definitely a relaxation- tv or reading eater. I mentally seem to tie relaxation with reward and food. I did a couple of things that worked for me but I do still fight it.
- stop go-to snacks for a long time. For me it was chips (normally half or all of a full bag), followed by cookies and milk. I ate junk that wasn’t these for a while. Still junk though.
- i next began to sub chocolate milk in place of the total junk. Still junk-ish but a cup of 1or 2% milk has less than 200 calories and still provides sweet. Find something that can work for you. And budget the calories for it so no guilt.
- An 8 oz bag of chips has 1260 calories. I went on a rower and tried to row 1260 calories. I got to about 200 calories and gave up. But I realized that even if I just cut my portion significantly I’d still have to bust it for like a half hour just to work off a two ounce serving.

It still haunts me some nights. On those nights I’m really “bad” I now have a cliff’s builder bar with one cup of low-fat milk. Seems to hold me and total is 400 cals. I leave about 250 for a snack so not too bad.