6 Secrets About Nighttime Snacking that Influencers Won’t Tell You

Hola amigos! Welcome back!

Do you see nighttime snacking as a problem?  Listen in to hear a real client’s story and how intuitive eating lead to many discoveries.

Highlights of this episode:

• Real life struggles
• Emotional Eating
• Permission to Eat
• Facts about Nighttime Snacking
• Approaches to Nighttime Snacking

Announcements:

We have conversations that help chop diet mentality and create peace with our bodies. We are focused on a compassionate approach to break free of weight stigma.

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Full Description:

Nighttime Snacking – Shero story

Today I am going to talk to you about nighttime snacking, the secrets that experts won’t tell you.  The three facts that experts won’t tell you, and the three approaches to nighttime snacking that I think you’ll find very interesting.

Last week I was talking to you about our Shero, Meredith, a Shero from my upcoming book. One of the things that she discovered was that me-time is important to start paying attention. It opened the door for a lot of changes that occurred. And this is one of the premises behind one small bite.

One of the things that she said to me was, David, “You know, the challenge that I have is at night, I can’t seem to get myself from snacking. I don’t know how to stop. It’s like if I have a bag of Doritos or if I have some cupcakes or some, uh, I don’t know, cookies or something laying around, usually I’m just going to go and grab something and it almost always happens every night.”

So let me give you a little understanding first, you know, so Meredith was a hard-working mother, hardworking Shero. She had a great career. She had three kids, one in high school and in middle school, one in elementary school. She was having problems at home. She was painting the picture-perfect lifestyle. But in reality, at home, things were challenging. And her relationship with food was built around this idea that her eating was wrong. That it wasn’t the way the world was telling you. Diet culture was telling her how she was supposed to look and how she’s supposed to eat. And so, she tried multiple diets.

One of the things that we discovered by realizing the me-time was how important that was to fuel her. So, one of the things that started happening is having that me-time time. She was able to start having breakfast more often, and she started having more energy and she was more productive and things really started to transform.

Interestingly, she also discovered that her nighttime snacking was about the same. It didn’t really change that much. So, we started looking into this. It’s like, wait, what’s going on? I thought that, or she thought that by having breakfast and by having a little bit more to eat early on in the day that she would stop that nighttime snacking.

It’s not this: “Oh, we’re gonna finally chop that nighttime snacking so she doesn’t have to gain weight anymore.” And this is important because this is what we do with intuitive eating. It’s not about a way of a backdoor into dieting.

Her life. There were her kids. All eating at different hours. Nobody was having dinner at the same time. And she, of course, didn’t have a very strong relationship with her husband and she would then go into work mode, and everybody moved into their rooms and were eating. Everybody was eating on their own time. She would pop open or computer, or just, uh, start doing some work at home. And one of the things that she realizes that she, in order to help pass the time, in order to deal with the emotional state, she started snacking quite a bit. She would snack and it would be anything quite honestly, she would focus mainly on some sweeter stuff.

So she would complain to me, David, I shouldn’t eat snacks or I shouldn’t eat carbohydrates. So we need to really put this into focus. 

Eating is emotional 

[10:30] Remember it’s the one thing that we do every single day, multiple times a day, that we put food in our bodies, something in our bodies we’re of course going to feel something. And so, yes, that is a physical. But it still elicits an emotional feeling. You know, we enjoy eating food. And as though you should.

3 Facts Experts Don’t Tell You

 (1) Nighttime snacking does not lead to weight gain.

[11:01] All right. Pause everybody. Take a second there. Think about that for a minute. One, nighttime Snacking does not lead to weight gain. Wait a minute, David, are you kidding me?

Are you telling me that if I snack at night that I’m just not eating up a lot of calories, unnecessary calories? Maybe you would, maybe you are. But what we’re trying to say here is that there are a lot of other factors that lead to waking. And what’s interesting is when we look at the research, we really can’t definitively show that nighttime snacking actually does lead to weight gain.

Is that related to weight gain? Maybe. But it’s very difficult to say cause and effect. There are a lot of other factors that can lead into weight gain and weight gain could actually be a good thing. Yeah, I am saying that. It really puts the conversation about diet culture really turns it on its head.

Weight gain is actually a sign that the body is sort of healing itself to some extent. Why? Because maybe it’s been at a starved state or maybe it is feeling threatened. If you listen to the previous episode, you remember me talking about the stress response and how one of the ways that we deal with stress, or we’re not one of the ways, but what happens in the stress response is that we’ve got a flood of hormones that create a flood of fat and sugar into the blood.

And so, we can actually gain weight from that stored energy because then our metabolism falls later on. And therefore, we have a slower metabolism, so, any food that we eat can be actually energy stored, so it can be stored later on. So, there are other things too, such as medications, aging, a slower metabolism, as I just mentioned a little while ago, and we have to accept body diversity.

Dieting is another way of saying avoiding or restricting food. When we avoid a restrict food, the rebound effect from the body is to desire it more. I I’ll talk a little bit about that desire deprivation thing, in just a minute. So, nighttime snacking does not lead to weight gain.

(2) A lack of willpower does not lead to nighttime snacking.

[15:45] We can’t imagine that it’s about willpower. We don’t use willpower with food. Good luck trying that. Okay. One of the things that I love about willpower and example that I love to give about willpower is what I call the diet cycle. So, when we have concerns about our weight, what we tend to do is – we try to restrict food in one way or another, either a timed-based eating, or maybe it’s a high-fat or maybe it’s a, a low fat, or maybe it’s a high carbohydrate, or maybe it’s a low carbohydrate, or a high protein way of eating.

Diets are just ubiquitous and if diets would work well, then we wouldn’t need so many diets, right. There would need to be just one. And wow. That goes back to a body diversity. It doesn’t work that, that way, what works for one person doesn’t work for everyone.

So you have the concern about weight, you go on a diet or you restrict food. Over-exercise. So on and so forth. And then what happens? Well then after a while there becomes this chaotic eating. Interesting. The lack of willpower does not lead to nighttime snacking. Willpower is not going to get to avoid nighttime, snacking, just the opposite. The more you try to lose weight, the more you try to restrict or avoid certain foods, different types, for whatever reason, the greater, the likelihood that is a perceived threat on the body and the greater, the likelihood that the nighttime snacking happens. Again, not that nighttime snacking is a bad thing. Nighttime snacking is a response to the body.

It’s a natural physiological response. Evelyn Tribole said it best when she talked about it’s like cutting your hair. When you go get a haircut, guess what grows back. And it’s a natural physiological response. It’s the same thing with depriving yourself. That’s what I mean a little while ago, when I said I’d get back to the deprivation desire, phenomenon. Evelyn Tribole and Elise Resch – in the book on the chapter about making peace with food – talk about the seesaw of deprivation and desire, the greater, the deprivation, the lower, the guilt, after a certain period of time, you can’t deprive so much.

So, then you overeat and then the nighttime snacking seems like guilt or shame or embarrassment when in reality it’s natural. So, it’s very important to understand that willpower alone, isn’t going to stop you from eating at night. And on the contrary, it’s going to make you eat a lot more food because you’re depriving your body of what it needs.

Diets, eating restrictions are a form of shame culture, and shame only creates more stress, loneliness, depression, and rigidity, which perfectionism is far or very close to that. And so, we end up trying to control more and it just gets worse and worse.

(3) Nighttime snacking simply could be your body trying to communicate

[20:20] Clients started discovering about what their body was telling them. Like Meredith, her curiosity was what really led to her understanding her body a little bit more. Nighttime snacking could be, well, your interoceptive awareness. If you listened to the previous episode, you heard what interoceptive awareness is. It’s the understanding or listening to the body. Physiological signals and cues for what it might need and want. And so nighttime snacking may be a response to low energy.

And this is something that’s very helpful. Right? We’ve heard this from experts. Oh, if you eat more protein at a meal, that’ll help you create curb that nighttime snacking. How many of you have tried that? (I’m raising my hand.) How many of you have tried that and haven’t seen any success? Well, let me tell you the thing that it could, the body could be telling you is you’re lonely or procrastinating. You don’t want to do what you have to do. Meredith didn’t want to eat alone at home. She didn’t want to have to deal with working. Snacking gives you something to do something different. Eating is emotional. So, she’s going to feel something when she eats. Yes. It could be a little bit of dopamine, which gives you that little bit of Mmmmmmm. But it’s also fundamentally- food has energy. Yeah. And it has calories. And so therefore we end up enjoying a little bit of that food and then it becomes habitual.

So, there was a habituation that was happening and all of this information is what Meredith started to really pay attention to.

[23:36] In summary – Snacking does not lead to weight gain. Number two, lack of willpower does not lead to nighttime snacking. And number three, nighttime snacking could be the body’s method of communicating interoceptive awareness- folks.

[24:00] Permission to Eat: 3 Approaches to Snacking 

(1) It’s totally okay to have snacks at night.

You can have as many snacks as you want. Wait, hold on a second. I know that that’s going to be a big one. You can have as many snacks as you want. As long as you are paying attention to the body. Now that doesn’t mean that you cannot eat more than what your body is telling you.

Sometimes you really just want to enjoy the food. Maybe you don’t need to eat, but the body is just enjoying the food. So, what’s important here is to know that nighttime snacking could be because you want to enjoy time with family and friends.

You’re not hungry, but your friends are eating. And so, Mmmmmm, that looks good. Or I’m in a want to be part of this group or why aren’t chatting with them as well. And so enjoy it. That’s really where I’m going. If you enjoy eating, what you’ll start finding is that you’ll probably won’t eat more than you’ll need, but when you are restricted and you tell it that’s an evil food, or that’s an illegal food, or that’s a cheat food, or that’s a food that I should not have, or that’s a food that is taboo, whatever label you’ve put on it is going to increase the opposite.

So therefore, you’re going to see that willpower-deprivation desire-seesaw syndrome play out in your, in your eating and in the way you relate to food.

(2) Are you eating enough throughout the day?

[22:50] And so in Meredith’s case, what was interesting is that over time, she really did enjoy having breakfast. She just didn’t really have the time. Every day of the week, there were a couple of days a week that over time she was able to have more of a sit-down breakfast and maybe eat something before she left home.

But often what she found, worked really well for her, her schedule, and her way of fueling herself so she feels better is that she would break out the meals or break up the meals into two. She wasn’t so focused on: “oh my God what do I eat.”

She was a little bit more rational. She was able to pay attention to her body and her lunch was a little bit more balanced as well. And she also, even at times had a snack before she came home. So sometimes the snacking was also helpful for her to kind of balance in the food groups. So she didn’t have to focus on, I have to eat fresh fruits with every meal, or I have to have a vegetable with every meal.

Sometimes their snack was like an apple and peanut butter or some chips and that’s it. A lot of clients will ask me, how should I eat snacks? Snacks can be anything, just as long as that you’re getting what you feel you need. Like a little bit of energy to help you get through the rest of the day. 

(3) Pause, Slow down and be Present

[28:29] When you do have a snack, especially at night, maybe, turn off the TV, move away from your smartphone or your computer or your tablet, and you know what, just have the snack and just enjoy it.

Sometimes you’ll discover that you won’t need as much as you used to. Maybe that will help you pay more attention to your body. And that’s exactly what started happening to Meredith. She was able by slowing down and being present with her eating, she was able to fully realize that she needed to go to sleep a little bit earlier.

She started realizing that she wanted to have a family dinner more often. That helped her connect a little bit more. For Meredith, that me-time meant that she started really just paying attention to what her body was telling her. And by the way, your mind is your body. Are there opportunities that I can do things differently?

Clients discover a little bit more about themselves. They start experimenting and they start learning a little bit more and. Meredith ended up becoming a lot more secure with her eating. She started trusting her body more. She had more energy and she still had other things to work on. She still wanted to continue her workout and routines, but boy, what a big change that was for her. Your challenge is to focus on one of those approaches.

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