- March 28, 2024
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Q: I do a pretty good job of controlling my food portions during the day, but tend to overeat at nighttime. What can I do to stop that pattern? – Ed S.
A: Great question, Ed! This tends to be a common pattern for a lot of people. This typically stems from one of two places: Not eating enough during the day or eating out of boredom at night. Most of the time we find that it’s more the first than it is the latter. Since I probably won’t be very effective with helping you discover a new hobby to overcome your boredom, I’ll focus on some things you can do to ensure that you’re prepared to eat enough during the day.
Believe it or not, curtailing the amount of food you eat at night starts when you first wake up in the morning. With the fast world we’re living in, so many people grab a cup of coffee and hit the road first thing in the morning and don’t slow down enough to eat a comprehensive breakfast. Compounded with that is the negative reputation that carbohydrates have gotten in recent years. Carbs are energy for our body and eating them with our breakfast helps fuel our body for our busy day. Eating complex carbs, along with protein, at breakfast will help you stay full for a longer period of time and help your blood sugar from dropping and making you want to overeat later.
Planning ahead for later meals and snacks is key when you’re on the go. Take an apple with you out the door or pick up the little packages of vegetables from the produce section of the grocery store. Not having something to snack on between meals could lead to overeating at lunch. If you don’t overeat at lunch, it still could lead to you overeating at night time, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid. The key with healthy snacks and planned meals is to never feel too hungry throughout the day. When we get to the point of feeling too hungry is when we typically overdo our food consumption at the next meal.
With your lunch, you’ll also want to include some of those complex carbohydrates, such as sweet potato, and some fibrous vegetables. Not planning to eat or having a specific time to eat that will help avoid getting hungry is a key player in ensuring that you don’t overeat later in the evening. If you know that you’ll be running around or have difficult time to stop for something healthy to eat, consider cooking for a few days during the weekend. Another great alternative, that takes all of the guesswork out of it, is store-bought planned meals. I’m not talking about microwave dinners! Places like Fit Life Foods in Winter Park have a great assortment of different food options that already have proper portions and balance. This is something that I’ve recently started to help take the guess work out of meal planning. I purchase prepared meals for several days at a time and I just have to grab one out of the refrigerator and heat it up. The food quality is good and I don’t have to think about how much of each component to put in my meal.
Planning to eat throughout the day and making sure that you don’t get over hungry is key to not overeating at night time. It’s when we eat too little during the day that we tend to binge at night, which leads to weight gain.
If you have questions about what you should specifically be eating or need some direction with meal planning or prep, reach out to us for help at [email protected]. We have a health coach that specifically focuses on eating behaviors and balance.
Patrick McGaha Jr., member experience manager at Anytime Fitness, Winter Park, is dedicated to building a welcoming environment in the club, conducive to helping members and clients reach their health fitness goals. To get your fitness and nutrition related questions answered by a certified personal trainer, or for a free personal training session, call us at 321-972-5833 or email [email protected]