Night Eating!!

iwriteprofessionally
iwriteprofessionally Posts: 18 Member
in Motivation and Support
I am running into trouble at night. I get hungry minutes after I take my nightly medications. While I have not yet gone over my calorie goal since starting, due to exercise, I am going over either fats or carbs every day. I crave things like peanut butter crackers at night. Any suggestions??

Replies

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,269 Member
    It's the calories that directly affect body weight, not the macronutrients.

    Macronutrients are important for nutrition, and nutrition is important for health, body composition, energy level and more, so I'm not suggesting it's a good plan to ignore macronutrients. But the reason isn't weight loss, directly. (Sub-par overall nutrition can cause fatigue, so lower our daily life calorie burn; or can make it hard to feel full, so make it tough to stick with a calorie goal. If those things happen, they could *indirectly* affect weight management.)

    If you're right around your calorie goal, there's no reason to think being over on protein or fat will be a problem. Being over on carbs is only a problem if one is so persistently and significantly over carbs, that it's not possible to get adequate protein or fats (both of which are "essential nutrients" in the sense that we must eat some, because our bodies can't manufacture them out of anything else, but it can manufacture carbs out of the others).

    If you're having night cravings, then eating something then is fine. (Timing of eating has at most minor impact on weight loss, despite many myths suggesting otherwise, unless it affects satiation.)

    However, if you'd prefer not to have the evening cravings, think about what makes them better or worse. You mentioned your meds, which is possible. But other options are cumulative fatigue from the day, cumulative stress from the day, suboptimal sleep the night before, sub-ideal nutrition, boredom, habit, dehydration, and more. Sometimes switching other meals' composition or timing has an effect. (I have fewer night cravings if I make it a point to get a good breakfast with solid protein, and protein through the day, for example.) These effects are very individual, so thinking about what might be your personal triggers, or your personal solutions, can be very helpful.

    Best wishes!
  • goal06082021
    goal06082021 Posts: 2,130 Member
    +1 to Ann and callsit, they are wise and you should listen to them.

    I'll also add a few steps you might take in the moment, because it also sounds like you might have inadvertently trained yourself to want snacks after pill time. If you ever learned about Pavlov's dogs in school, that's what you might've done to yourself - classical conditioning.

    You've got basically three options for dealing with this conditioned response of "want peanut butter crackers" after the stimulus of "take pill." You can:
    • Replace the response with a new one: instead of peanut butter crackers, how about a nice mug of herbal tea? Hot drinks take a good long time to finish, and plain tea (no sweetener or creamer) has negligible calories. Since this is a nighttime problem, I'd advise caffeine-free or herbal tea; there are plenty of flavors that taste great without any doctoring. I like Celestial Seasonings' Sleepytime or chamomile; my dad's wife is a fan of vanilla rooibos but I can't recall the brand she gets.
    • Extinguish the response: Sometimes cravings are just a waiting game; if you can put it off long enough, you'll forget about whatever it is your inner toddler insisted they must have right this minute. And eventually, when the stimulus stops producing the expected response, you retrain your brain to stop expecting it. Drink some more water, or go do something else after taking your pills.
    • Accept it and make room in your calorie budget for some peanut butter crackers (or whatever) in the evenings after pill time. I shop at Aldi, they sell peanut butter crackers packaged for kids, like to put in their lunches for school - a packet of 4 little cracker sandwiches is 130 calories. It's probably not difficult to shave 130 calories off the rest of your day and save them for that little indulgence at night.
  • iwriteprofessionally
    iwriteprofessionally Posts: 18 Member
    Thank you, both, so much!! This helps a ton!!
  • iwriteprofessionally
    iwriteprofessionally Posts: 18 Member
    All three of you!!

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