Help! I Snack in the Middle of the Night!

How to Break Night Time Eating Habits

One of the worst things you can do for weight loss and preventing diabetes is to get up in the middle of the night and eat food.  In this article I am addressing eating that happens after you have already gone to bed for the night.  Many people fall asleep, and then at some point in the middle of the night they wake up and have trouble going back to sleep.  They often head to the kitchen and get something to eat to help calm and distract their mind and then go back to bed.  Over the years, if you have been doing this consistently, your body starts to expect it and it can be difficult to change this habit. 

Why Is Night Time Eating a Problem?   

Night time eating is probably one of the worst things you can do to stall weight loss.  The reason is that overnight is our longest window of decreased insulin, and this is when fat burning is at its highest.  Remember, we only have access to fat burning when insulin levels are low, as insulin is the hormone that tells us to store food as fat on our body.  If you eat in the night, you are interrupting this cycle.  

Additionally, if you have already eaten your normal amount of food during the day, and then you eat more at night, you will not lose weight.  Weighing too much is a problem of both overeating as well as a hormonal problem.  By eating in the night, you are 1) Overeating and 2) Raising your fat storage hormone (insulin) when you should be in fat burning mode.  This will definitely lead to increased weight gain over time. 

Type 2 Diabetes is a problem of insulin resistance.  If you are trying to prevent or reverse type 2 Diabetes, you need to make sure you are not eating in the middle of the night.  Eating in the middle of the night prevents your body from having a break from food and therefore insulin.  Having too much insulin circulating all the time leads to increased insulin resistance.  If your goal is to reverse insulin resistance, then you need to overcome the habit of eating in the middle of the night. 

Why Eating a Low Carb Diet Helps Break the Habit

For my clients who are trying to lose weight or prevent diabetes, I recommend a diet that is low in carbohydrates.  This means you want to significantly decrease (if not eliminate) your intake of processed sugar and flour, including breads, pasta, and grains.  To improve satiety, you need to add healthy fats.

If you adopt a low carbohydrate diet, at about the 4-6 week time frame you start to become "fat adapted".  This means that your body is starting to shift more easily into going to your fat stores for energy between meals.  You will find that you are not really that hungry between meals, and if you do feel hunger, it is less intense than in the past.  It becomes much more manageable.  You will also find that if you have hunger, it comes in a wave for 20-30 minutes, and then dissipates for a couple hours.  This is normal.  In the past it was likely very intense and you would eat immediately so you did not notice that it was just a wave.   After becoming fat adapted, your body then goes to your fat stores and uses it for energy, in a process known as gluconeogenesis. 

Adopting the lower carbohydrate diet will allow you to not feel hunger as intensely during the night.  Your cravings will be more manageable.  It also has the benefit of really improving your insulin levels and leads to weight loss. 

How to Break the Habit

Waking up in the middle of the night is often a habit that has developed over many years.  Your body starts to become dependent on it as part of a schedule.  In order to break this habit that took many years to develop, you will need to plan on consistently working to decondition yourself over several weeks. 

Start with having good set up conducive to sleep.  Make sure you do not have any lights on in your room - even the alarm clock.  If you wake up, and see the lights on the clock showing 3:00am, you feel stressed.  You might have thoughts of “I am going to be exhausted tomorrow” or “I won’t get enough sleep and can’t make it through my day”.  When this happens, you immediately release cortisol, which wakes you up and prevents you from returning to sleep.  Turn the alarm clock away so you can't see it, and get rid of any lights that are on electronics.  If you have an alarm set, it really does not matter what time it is when you wake up, so don’t bother having the clock where you can see it. 

When you wake up, first try to go back to sleep without getting up or tuning on lights.  If that does not work, I still recommend staying in bed and trying meditation - a great app is Headspace and it has a good section on helping with sleep and going back to sleep after waking up (I have no affiliation).  Another technique is to visually imagine relaxing your body one part at a time.  You would start by imagining your toes getting relaxed and sleepy, then your feet, then move on to the ankles.  Do this slowly, and really feel your muscles and tension release from each part.  Move slowly up the body, and you will usually be asleep long before you get to your head.  This also serves to direct your attention away from any anxious thoughts that may further stimulate cortisol release. 

I Am Still Wide Awake and Hungry, Now What?

By far the most common reason that my clients have for waking up and eating food is that they feel their mind racing with anxiety, fears and other thoughts and emotions that are very uncomfortable.  When you are experiencing uncomfortable emotions, your brain often tells you to eat food.   Food provides comfort and distraction from these uncomfortable emotions.  Unfortunately, while you will feel better in the moment, it will not serve your long term goals for health and weight loss.

Many people wake up and immediately start having anxious thoughts about being awake.  It turns out though, that your thoughts are optional.  You can choose to change your thought to one that serves you better.  To do this, spend some time pre-planning a thought ahead of time.  What are some good thoughts to get you through this situation?  You may have some yourself, but here are some suggestions to get you started:

- I am becoming fat adapted, this hunger will not be that intense

- I am starting to train my body not to need food in the middle of the night

- I am learning to allow the feeling of hunger

- My body has plenty of food on it, I just need to wait for my body to realize that and go to my fat stores.

The thought must be true and believable to you.  Otherwise it will not work.  Spend some time thinking about how you want to feel the next time you wake up.  What thought do you want to have, and what feeling do you want it to lead to?

If you do decide to get up, get a cup of warm, relaxing (non-caffeinated) tea and sit down to do some journaling.  For more information on how to journal for weight loss, see my previous post here.  Get out whatever is causing the anxiety or stress in your head down on paper.  This will help you process it, and sit with your emotions for awhile.  Rather than feeling upset about being out of bed, you might reframe your thinking about how nice it is to have the time to yourself to reflect while the kids are sleeping and the house is quiet.  

Give this process a try for the next few weeks.  Don't be upset if it does not go smoothly at first, just keep working on it. It takes some time to undo conditioning that has taken years to develop, so have patience with yourself.  It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. 

If you would like any additional help with breaking this habit or weight loss in general, please contact me to schedule a free consultation session.