Night Cravings

I've got a real issue with night cravings. I can be very conscious and eat my vegetables and fruit all day, but my evenings end up home alone, and I snack. Sometimes a snack a lot.  By a lot, I mean I might eat popcorn, followed by a bowl of cereal, followed by a few or more than a few of my favorite Dove Dark Promises.  This much is unusual, luckily, but it happened.  And every single night, there are these kinds of incidents.  The munchies just consume me. If it was a bad day, I'll even eat until its uncomfortable, and get off the couch to search the kitchen for more.

Reviewing various food logs over the past few months makes it clear - this is the danger zone. This is the behavior I need to target.  The other big danger zone is late afternoon at work. I'm more successful at not eating too much then, only because the options are very bad.  But I get restless and want to have something in my mouth. I have been known to visit the vending machines. Pretzels and oreos and chocolate chip cookies, and even fritos, have been known to emerge.

I'm trying to target this behavior and change it for both time zones.  I'm very aware of both, but my strategies will be different.  For work, I should have fancy waters and fruit.  Apples can be my savior there. Maybe even carrots. Something that will enter my mouth and let me know I'm eating something.

But evenings, I think I have to just say no. During the Big Loss fifteen years ago, I was on an eating plan that had a wacky idea - the evening meal could involve any food I wanted, in any quantity I wanted, but it all had to be consumed in one hour. After that, nothing for the rest of the day. This was the original Carbohydrate Addict's diet, and it was based on some fairly dubious theories on managing insulin. The idea was carbs cause you to release insulin, which makes you want more carbs. But there mentioned a second release of insulin if you keep eating for a long time, and that was more damaging. I haven't seen anyone else in the diet world ever think there was anything valid about the one-hour time limit.

On this diet, there was no snacking at all.  And they said it was better to skip breakfast than to eat the wrong foods for breakfast. Starches were restricted to dinner only. Breakfast and lunch needed to be protein focused - small amounts of vegetables but very little fruit was allowed. Dinner was to be divided into thirds - protein, vegetables, and starch (including dessert). You could eat as much as you wanted, but you had to match your carb intake with equal sized portions of meat and veggies and finish in an hour. Fat?  Not an issue.  It just came along for the ride with the meat and vegetables. So a typical day for me could include eggs and bacon for breakfast, chicken caesar salad for lunch (no croutons and dressing checked for carb count), and steak and broccoli with sour cream and parmesan for dinner, with a brownie or cookies for dessert.  Then, the kitchen was shut down.

Even if the insulin release theory is hooey, the fact is I was able to stick to this diet for eighteen months and I lost (peak to valley, even if only for one day on each end) 50 pounds. I went about a year with no plateau, just a steady loss. And today I'm still 35 pounds below that peak.

So I think closing the kitchen is the thing. I should go brush my teeth right after dinner and not allow anything else to pass my lips.  Except for my take-before-bed cholesterol medicine, of course, which will involve a high-risk trip into the kitchen.  I'm going to give this a try for a few days and see how it goes.

I have intermittently been reading The Power of Habit, which I wrote about here.  I have a bad habit in the evenings, and I need to break the habit.  What the book says, is that you cannot actually break a habit.  But you can overlay an old habit with a new habit.  I need a new cue, response, reward cycle to replace the "come home, flop on couch with snack (which is its own reward)" cycle. Come home, brush teeth, and flop on couch to .... watch Dr. Who (my latest streaming video vice)?  Shop on internet? Need to get a reward built into this. Maybe tally my calories and rejoice they are so low, using my fun gadgets.

Hmmm....