How to Reduce Nighttime Food Cravings

Do you do most of your excess eating at night – either after dinner or before you go to bed? Is evening the hardest time for you to stay on your food plan?  

If you’re anything like I used to be, you’ve gotten into the habit of eating in the evening to relax from the stress of the day.  You may be in the habit of relaxing with Netflix and eating popcorn or chips while watching.  There is nothing wrong with relaxing by watching Netflix, or reading, or knitting, or doing something else non-food related.  However, if you’re eating foods in the evening when you are not hungry, and those foods are contributing to your being overweight, then your night eating may be where you need to concentrate on making changes. 

Nighttime food cravings are usually for foods that are sweet, salty, and/or full of processed carbs.  These foods increase the dopamine in your brain (your "feel good" hormone) and so make you crave more of these foods.  Some research suggests that there may also be an urge from your internal clock to eat in the evening - leftover from ancestors who were living in caves and hunting for their food. Their brains may have encouraged them to store energy when food was available for times when the food would not be very plentiful. 

Nowadays, you have easy access to food at any time.  Certainly, the more often you eat sugary, starchy, or processed foods at night, the more the habit becomes ingrained and the more your body wants that dopamine hit.  Before you eat at night, I recommend that you check in with yourself to see if you are hungry.  If you are not physically hungry, do not eat.  Check out the freebie available at the bottom of the page on my website on "Urges" if you need some help with how to handle urges to eat when you are not hungry.  While you’re processing or just allowing your urge to eat, you can journal about your urge, take deep breaths, or just sit with the urge until it goes away.  And it will go away - usually after a very short time. 

Before you can process an urge, you have to decide that learning this skill is important to you.  The more frequently you just allow your urges, the easier it will become. Eventually, you will no longer want to eat at night when you're not hungry.  If you have an urge jar (see my freebie on Urges), put a marble or bead in the jar every time you successfully allow an urge to eat when you're not hungry. Celebrate yourself when you successfully handle an urge to eat!

If you are truly hungry (and one way to know is if you could eat a cold chicken breast or some plain vegetables to manage your hunger), then eat something that will not increase your dopamine. Also, think about eating more food for dinner if you are frequently hungry in the evening. 

If you are having difficulty handling your cravings at nighttime, or any other time, I can help you to handle those cravings so that you can permanently lose your excess weight.  Go to my website: https://drbarbaralkatzcoaching.mykajabi.com and request to schedule a consultation call with me.  It is free and there is no obligation and no pressure.  Wouldn’t you love to get rid of your urges and cravings?  It is possible – even if you’ve never succeeded in the past.   

Make sure you’re receiving my weekly posts which have lots of good information about how you can lose weight for the last time.  And share this post with a friend who might also like receiving this information. Please contact me if you have any questions at [email protected].