Step Three: Habits - Conquering Night Eating

Because I realized at the age of 20 that there were no easy answers to my own morbid obesity, I had to come up with ways to lose weight on my own. It was my willingness to experiment, to step off the beaten path, that led to my current system of weight loss. Change had to come from within. Each of us eats for different reasons. Therefore, as individuals, we need to start with one bad habit and slowly, consistently substitute a good habit. Moreover, we need to simultaneously ask ourselves why and how we developed this bad habit.

One of the most common bad habits among emotional eaters is night eating. Does that sound familiar? You’re busy all day long. You have a job, school, children or other responsibilities. You’re running here, carpooling there. You’re putting in late nights at the office just to hang on to your job and your health insurance. You’re under too much stress on a daily basis. You are exhausted.

By the time you get home, you need to relax and calm down, or you’ll never be able to sleep. You’re drained physically and emotionally. So, you sit down in your favorite chair or on the couch. You watch TV, or you read, listen to music, or you go over your notes for a meeting the next day. You just want to soothe yourself, reward yourself, nurture yourself after giving so much to everyone else. You deserve a treat. OK, you’ve just had dinner, but so what? Maybe you’d like a little ice cream. After the first few bites your mouth is frozen, and you can’t really taste it, but you eat it all anyway. Then, you sit back and relax. Soon, before you even realize it or think about it, you’ve ripped open a bag of chips. You reach into the bag during a commercial, and you’re shocked that it’s nearly empty. Wasn’t that a full bag when you started?

Or, you take the healthy approach to night eating. You put together a large bowl of various cereals topped with wheat germ and layers of banana and sliced strawberries. You add some low-fat milk and gobble down the whole thing. It’s cereal and fresh fruit with low-fat milk, so isn’t that healthy food? Maybe you cut slice after slice of cheddar cheese and eat it on whole grain crackers. Aren’t those great choices? You’re eating protein and complex carbs, so what could be bad?

Well, maybe the foods are healthy, but it’s late at night. Those calories are not going to get burned off by exercise or daily activities. It isn’t exactly aerobic to brush your teeth, change in your pajamas and go to sleep. Therefore, all of those excess calories turn into stored fat. When this pattern of night eating repeats itself on a near-daily basis, the pounds keep adding up. People do not realize that a mere extra 100 calories per day will eventually translate into about 10 pounds of additional weight over the course of a year. The margin for error is very slim, indeed.

Most people who are night eaters find this a very difficult habit to break. Over the years, our brains become hard-wired to eat away the stresses of the day. Without even giving it a second thought, we start to eat after dinner, and we eat until we go to bed. I spoke to one woman who admitted that she ate so much at night that she often woke up surrounded by a half-empty bag of chips, a stack of crackers and crumbs in her bed. Sometimes, she whispered sadly, she had no idea she’d even taken these foods into her bedroom. She was on automatic pilot. Yes, it frightened her, but she had no idea how to fix the problem.

I asked her if she’d talked to her doctor or a therapist about her night eating. Apparently her doctor had confronted her when she went in for her last physical. He’d lectured her about her weight year after year, which had only caused her to get upset and eat more. His solution? “Just stop doing it!” he’d barked.

Well, that’s easier said than done. If you have an addiction to food, you can’t just stop. It doesn’t work that way. It’s an addiction. For example, the person who reaches for a cigarette with their coffee each morning is addicted to nicotine and habituated to certain daily rituals. There is the cigarette on the drive to work. The cigarette break outside, even when it’s freezing. The first puff after work. Beer and cigarettes with friends on the weekends. People who want to quit smoking not only need help withdrawing from nicotine, but they need to often change their daily habits because those habits trigger the hard-wiring in their brains that commands them to reach for a cigarette.

Although people can learn to live without nicotine, people cannot live without food. We must eat to live. The substance to which we are addicted cannot be kept out of our lives. So, how do we change those bad habits? How do we rewire our brains?

With night eating, I made a decision to start very slowly. What I’d learned was that doing anything cold turkey did not work for me. Quitting night eating cold, which I’d tried to do dozens of times, only led me to get nervous, frustrated and depressed. I’d feel deprived and miserable. My brain would keep telling me to eat. I deserved it. I’d worked hard all day. It was like a little devil whispering in my right ear, “Eat, you know you want to.” The angel who whispered in my left ear pleaded, “Please don’t do it,” would eventually get drowned out. I simply could not control the impulse.

Realizing that my brain needed to be retrained truly helped me to understand why, even though I’m not a weak-willed person, I gave in to the ice cream or toast with jam or the reheated leftovers time after time.

My first step was to ask myself some questions? What foods were trigger foods? By that I mean, what foods will cause me to eat more and more and more until I’m in a food coma. Those foods comprised two elements. High fat foods and high sugar foods were my two worst problems. I know that if I start to eat ice cream, for example, I simply cannot stop until I’ve eaten it all. Ice cream is both high fat and high sugar. Sour cream is another example. I always used to joke, “Give me a pint of sour cream and a long handled spoon and go away, please.” I could easily sit down and eat the whole thing. I realized that these foods soothed me, calmed me, relaxed me. They were like tranquilizers to me. I didn’t need a Valium. I needed a hot fudge sundae!

So, I decided that the first step was to keep the high fat foods out of the house. I named my house my “food fortress.” This is the exact same technique I use today. Only good foods can safely enter my food fortress. The trigger foods must be kept out in order for me to stay safe. If I am secure inside of my food fortress, then I cannot be tempted to eat myself into a food coma.

Yes, I have worked with clients who will throw on a jacket and head to the nearest convenience store to buy their favorite trigger foods at 2 AM, but that involves a whole other set of strategies for change. For now, we’ll stick to how I resolved night eating for myself.

On the first night inside my food fortress, as hard as I tried, I kept obsessing about high fat foods, sugar, cookies, even things I didn’t like or want. My brain was telling me to feed it. I began to shake and sweat. It was like going into a drug withdrawal. I knew that I could not go cold turkey. Doing that would involve deprivation. Deprivation = dieting. That never works. So, I cut up an apple, took a few crackers and cut a small cube of cheese. All of the foods were healthy, and the portions were small. Slowly, ever so slowly, I concentrated on eating, enjoying every taste sensation, every bite. If my attention or thoughts strayed, I brought them back to eating. I wanted to be conscious of my choices, conscious of eating. For far too long, night eating was simply an unconscious habit. That had to change. So, for a while, that is all I did at night. I ate healthy food, smaller portions and kept myself focused on what and why I was eating. Once I had that part of the process down pat, I started on the next phase.

What will soothe me other than food? I asked myself. I ran a bath for myself, climbed in with a book and started to read. I made myself soak and soak until my skin was puckered and beet red. Eventually, the panic and shakes went away. I felt drowsy. After rubbing in some refreshing body lotion, I climbed into bed and fell asleep. I actually went to sleep without eating at night for the first time in over a decade!

The next morning, I woke up really hungry. That was a new and different sensation. Usually, I’d eaten so much food the night before that I was never hungry in the morning. I was both surprised and delighted because I realized this was proof that I had made a change in my eating habits.

Proud of my accomplishment, I was sure it would be easier on night #2. No, it wasn’t. Remember, our brains get hard-wired over a period of years. I kept telling myself that if my brain was wired to eat at night, I could develop strategies that would help me to eventually cut that wire and reroute it. I was determined to keep to my new program. On the second night, I again started to shake and have cravings. Temptation was overwhelming me. I told myself, “This is a bad habit. It need not be a life-long habit.” Instead of giving in, I called a fellow classmate to ask some questions about a reading assignment. Honestly, I didn’t need help with my homework. I needed help with my night eating. My school friend and I discussed the assignment and then we got to gossiping about some of our classmates, especially the one who always arrived late and asked the most questions. We had a lot of fun on the phone and even made a date to get together for coffee after our class. What I realized, when I got off the phone, is that by totally shifting my focus, I had not only lost the urge to eat, but I had started to build a new friendship.

Each night, I worked on this challenge. Some nights, I failed and gave in to eating again. But, when I did, I told myself the following: I am human. I will make mistakes. I will search my heart and forgive myself. I will not punish or reward myself with food. I will nourish my body with food, but I will nourish my heart and mind and spirit with loving kindness toward myself and others. I will move forward. I will remain committed to my plan. Over time, I will succeed.

The process took several years. Yes, several years! It wasn’t easy. There were ups and downs. When my life took a very stressful turn, I reverted to eating to calm myself. I regained some weight I’d lost. But, instead of throwing in the towel, I reminded myself that I could do this. I had done this. I just had to return to my program and use the strategies that I had developed that I knew worked for me. Eventually, I learned to do other things at night. If I watched television, I made sure to get up and walk around the house while commercials were on because any food ads made me want to eat. That was an effective strategy for change. If I read, I used a squeeze ball to help strengthen my arthritic fingers. That kept my other hand busy so I wouldn’t be reaching for food. If I decided that I truly was hungry, I’d make a firm decision about what I could eat and how much, knowing that it was not an invitation to keep eating. I might have a slice of toast with no butter or an apple or a small yogurt. But, by that point, I could recognize true hunger as opposed to just eating to soothe myself or relieve stress or boredom. It was not emotional eating anymore.

All eating must be conscious eating. When we eat, we need to understand why we are doing it until we slowly rewire our brains. Now, when I’m stressed out, I actually can’t eat. That is proof to me that my system works. As I live each day, I have a chance to reinforce my hard-won good habits. It does take time, effort and consistency, but it can be done. I am living proof that you can conquer compulsive eating for life!

I would welcome your comments, your questions, your thoughts about your own bad eating habits. What kind of strategies have worked or failed for you? What eating habits are still challenging for you?