This means you are all out of excuses for plowing through your meal like there's no tomorrow.
Unlike at breakfast or lunch, most of us have nothing important to do after dinner. Practicing mindful eating habits at dinner is another way to bolster your willpower. Consider putting an egg on it, or adding beans or lentils (or more vegetables, if that's what you're lacking) to your meal to make it more substantial. My own late night trail mix habit finally lost its power over me when I stopped pretending I should only eat a small salad at dinner. This means eating something satisfying and nutritious that you really enjoy. The next step is making sure that you replenish as much as your willpower as possible during dinner itself (remember, willpower requires blood sugar). Never forget that habits can and will be reprogrammed if you attack them correctly. You're just acting out a script because your brain is tired. It isn't because you're too weak to overcome these temptations. It isn't because the ice cream tastes too good to resist, or the cookies are singing their siren song of seduction. Step one is recognizing that these late night eating patterns are indeed habits.
So what should we do? Manage and Replenish Your Willpower These habits are also especially strong, since they are deeply entrenched through weeks, months and years of repetition. Bad food habits are hard to break as is, but at night we have even less self-control than at other times of day for reshaping them, so we usually don't even try. It makes sense that these late night eating habits are particularly difficult to kick. We just continue until the cookies are gone, or the carton is empty. All the cues and triggers around our home-the TV, computer, couch, etc.-guide us mindlessly to the pantry for the cookies, or the freezer for the ice cream, and we eat to our heart's content (not our mind's or stomach's content those guys stopped caring hours ago). Without a well of willpower to rely on at the end of the day, our brains go into autopilot to avoid more heavy lifting.įor these reasons, more than at any other time of day our evening actions are guided by habit. Even if you enjoy your job, you are still subject to countless stressors throughout the day that deplete your cognitive resources -especially those required for self-control. If you feel like a zombie every night when you get home from work, it's because you pretty much are one. This post originally appeared on Summer Tomato. We're all susceptible to curling up with a snack while we wind down our day, but it can be an unhealthy habit that's hard to kick. Whenever I ask people what the most difficult habit is for them to break, late night snacking is often the first thing they say.
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