3 Reasons Why You Feel Out of Control Around Food at Night (and what to do instead)
Picture this: you get home from a long day at work and your stomach is growling. You start by opening your refrigerator and then it feels like no time has passed but you realize that you ate through everything in your fridge and cabinets. You might be wondering, how did this happen again?!
“I was so good with my eating today but once I got home it felt like something came over me and I could not stop eating!”
The next day you promise yourself you will be better with your meal, but the cycle just continues and you feel out of control around food every night.
3 Reasons Why You Feel Out of Control Around Food at Night
You skip breakfast
You work through lunch
You think snacks are over-rated
Why does this happen?
When you under-eat during the day, your body experiences it as a threat. Hunger hormones surge, your brain's reward system lights up around food, and by evening your willpower is no match for biology. Feeling out of control around food at night is your body’s natural response to restriction during the day. Your body will always find a way to get what it needs. Nighttime eating after daytime restriction is a predictable, physiological response.
The science behind feeling out of control around food
Daytime restriction elevates ghrelin, the hunger hormone, which peaks in the evening and makes food feel urgent and out of control.
The brain's prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision making, is significantly impaired when blood sugar is low which means that by the time you get home starving, the part of your brain that makes "rational" food choices is already offline.
Studies on meal timing consistently show that people who eat more earlier in the day consume fewer total calories and report feeling more in control around food than those who restrict until evening.
If you are sick of feeling out of control around food and want to try to find peace with food and your body, try these tips:
Eat something within an hour of waking up, even if it's small, to signal to your body that food is available and safe
Set a reminder every 3-4 hours to check in with your hunger. If you don’t get hunger cues, eat something every 3-4 hours.
Before you feel shame about eating past fullness late at night, ask yourself if you nourished your body appropriately during the day? This might have been your body’s reaction to not getting enough food.
Practice relaxation/grounding skills for 1-5 minutes 3x/day.
You are never not ‘sick enough’ to get help. If every night and/or every weekend you feel out of control around food and eat past fullness, reach out to an eating disordered informed dietician and therapist. They can help you heal your relationship to food so that you don’t spend all day preoccupied thinking about food. Imagine a life without anxiety/guilt around food and your body. It is possible. Help is available.