Binge Eating At Night? Here's How To Stop

Do you get to the end of a "good” day with food and it all seems to go downhill after dinner? I've been there. I’d try SO hard to be good and conscious of what I was eating during the day and then all hell seemed to break loose at night. No matter what I did, I didn’t know how to stop overeating at night!

There's a direct correlation between satisfaction and eating "balanced" (aka eating "normally"). If you’re restricting at all during the day or eating a lot of light or diet foods, you are much more likely to binge at night.

None of those are that diet-y, but they are forms of restrictions (I told you it can be sneaky!).

What do you want the food to do for you? Looking at the WHY behind eating is a great start to begin to let go of bingeing. What are you really wanting from the food?

There are a million reasons why we use food. But look at this situation specifically. What is the big reason you are using food?

Hint: For a lot of women, it's reward. Rewarding yourself for the day being done, working hard, meeting deadlines, cooking dinner, putting kids to bed and finally, finally, finally…the food becomes a way to reward yourself. To actually spend some time on YOU instead of catering to everyone else in your life every minute of the day.

It could also be comfort. Soothing your frazzled nerves from a stressful day. It could be relieving loneliness, filling an emptiness or unhappiness inside, or wanting pleasure.

You see, you don’t just stop bingeing; you do something else instead. You uncover why you’re using food and begin to experiment with learning how to fulfill those reasons with something else. Does that happen overnight? No. But if you commit to exploring the reasons you’re using food and looking at how to get what it is you really want, it can happen.

My view of bingeing is that it ends up falling away as it no longer serves you. You don’t just make another rule to stop bingeing, you learn how to get your needs met on a deeper level so that you don’t need to overeat to fill the need anymore. Make time to transition.

This is something that is often overlooked. If we’re in the flurry and chaos of the day, we continue to feel frazzled, overtaxed, and stressed out. If we never stop and pause, it seems like the day is just one long, endless day of chaos.

We need time to move into the different components of our days. This is how you begin to switch habits. So maybe your transition is to come home from work every day and instead of jumping into making dinner and cleaning the house, you sit on the couch with a cup of tea for 10 minutes. Or you go for a walk, snuggle with your pet, read a few pages of a book, or listen to a soothing song that you love.