7 Ways To Deal With Night Time Overeating
Filed Under: Overeating
25 October 2024 | Written by Xenia Ayiotis
Do you struggle with overeating at night? Don’t worry, you are not alone. In many of my coaching sessions lately, we’ve been talking about the distress clients feel from overeating at night and what to do about it.
There is no quick fix to end it and I hesitate to say “end” it, because I am not sure that it ever goes away entirely. Night time overeating is a symptom of other things going on in our lives. Managing the symptom requires gentle awareness followed by imperfect action.
What does overeating at night look like?
You come home and head straight for the kitchen. This could be as a way to transition to coming home or it could be because you haven’t eaten enough during the day so you are starving. When we let ourselves get ravenously hungry it’s going to be difficult not to stop at stuffed. In this case over hunger is the problem, not overeating.
You taste and snack as you cook and by the time it’s dinner, you’re no longer hungry and you eat your entire meal until you feel uncomfortably full. It’s hard not to eat if you have spent so much time preparing the food.
You find it hard to watch TV without eating and while you are watching, you are not really aware of the taste of the food or the sense of fullness in your body.
You snack from the time you come home until you go to sleep or you bring out the treats secretly when everyone has gone to bed. And you snack before sleeping in case you wake up hungry.
The reasons we eat at night can be classified into 3 categories:
Physical
Skipping meals during the day or restricting your food intake will mean that your body is ravenous by the time you get home.
You are so tired that you use food to keep you awake at night either to work or have some much needed “me” time.
You may be experiencing physical pain, a headache or back ache and eating helps to distract you from the pain or to relieve it temporarily.
Emotional
Many of us experience a lot of stress and anxiety during the day that coming home to eat is a relief from the pressures of the day. Eating takes the edge off your anxiety – this can be done with food, alcohol and Netflix or a combination of all three.
Eating has become your only source of pleasure. If your needs are not being met and you are having very little fun and pleasure, food takes on new meaning. You use food to unwind or to help you cope with difficult emotions like boredom, procrastination, loneliness or a sense of emptiness. Food can be away of filling the “gaps” or the hole in your heart.
Habitual
Eating in response to unmet physical or emotional needs becomes habitual. The more you do it, the more you need it to calm your nervous system.
7 kind ways to manage night time eating
- Eat regularly and don’t restrict or deprive yourself during the day. Allow yourself your favourite foods with no guilt to prevent guilt-induced overeating.
- If you are constantly reaching for food, it’s likely you have a very strong habit encoded in that part of your brain. If your instinct is to resist and try use willpower not to eat, unfortunately this can have the opposite effect by making food MORE desirable. Sadly, actively trying to resist food is not effective or sustainable and often makes eating more appealing. What you could try do instead is to delay for a few minutes, this pause allows you to sit in a moment of discomfort and can be the start of a new habit. After the few minutes have passed, you are welcome to eat and remember to acknowledge yourself for sitting in discomfort.
- Connect with your body. Get to know your hunger signals and try not let yourself get to a starving point. Connecting to your body also helps with awareness of emotions. Are you feeling hungry or anxious? Often anxiety is misunderstood for hunger.
- Identify your reasons for eating at night and find ways to deal with them. Is there a hidden need that you aren’t meeting? If it’s stress explore ways to relieve the stress through yoga, breathing and meditation.
- Give yourself permission to eat at night. Do it with awareness, curiosity and understanding. If you choose to eat, can you do it to a point that is comfortable like eating to a point of just “taking the edge off”? The key aspect here is understanding and compassion. You are not eating at night because you are weak and lack willpower, there are other underlying reasons. Try and get to know those reasons.
- Change your routine and patterns when you come home. So instead of going straight to the fridge, experiment with doing different things.
- Incorporate more “bite-size” moments of self-care, pleasure, fun, nature and creativity into your life.
I hope this helps give you an understanding of the different reasons for night time eating and that you can see the behaviour from a lens of self-compassion instead of self-judgment. Feel free to share your thoughts with me, I love hearing from you.
Wishing you well,
Xen
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