How to stop late-night snacking?

First of all, make sure you’re eating enough at dinner time, and try to make it a more protein-based meal as it will be lower in GI and therefore fill you up for longer. Secondly you should be eating every three hours or so – but not really two or three hours before you got to bed. So calculate what time you expect to be sleeping and work out your snack times from that. For instance, if I know I’ll be up till midnight, I’ll have dinner 6.30, a snack at nine and then nothing after. 

But that’s the easy part. The hard part is the habit you have of snacking whilst watching TV or just snacking from boredom. Here I have a two-pronged approach. First, if you’re going to snack, then have a healthy option. The best way to do that is with a safe house – no junk means you can’t crumble unless you have to go out for it. Chances are you won’t. There’s some great healthy options you can have that won’t make you feel like you’re going without. Diet jelly with strawberries or blueberries is delicious. Occasionally for a treat, have some low fat Gelato or some Nestle low fat chocolate mousse with strawberries. Yummo. But I love really simple things like frozen mangoes and fresh fruit salad. Just watch the serving sizes. Don’t forget to drink lots of water too – often dehydration gets mistaken for hunger.

Secondly, do the distraction program. I use this often and find if I’m genuinely not hungry then I need to keep my hands and mouth busy. Oh that sounds dirty but it isn’t, I promise. First the mouth – chewing gum or sugar free lollies such as Jols. Brush your teeth as soon after dinner as possible as it spoils your taste for sweet things. Then keep your hands busy with the love-yourself list. Write up a list of things you can do that pamper you and distract you from eating food you don’t need. Like:

* Do your nails

* Have a foot spa

* Moisturise your body

* Brush your hair and put in a treatment

* Pluck your eyebrows

* Wax your legs

* Give yourself a facial mask

* Whiten your teeth (keeps your mouth busy as well)

* Apply some fake tan

* Moisturise your feet with Body Shop foot cream….ooh er

If that’s not your thing then get busy scrap booking photos and momentos, send cards to your friends for no reason, blog your heart out, get knitting, hey, what about doing sit-ups? I used to sit on a ball and do sit-ups during the commercials. I must have done 500 sit-ups a night – it was brilliant. The reality is, if you’ve eaten enough you won’t be hungry. If you’re eating for other reasons then just get busy. Think of it this way: one moment of food pleasure versus the endless pleasure of wearing those hot jeans all year long without worrying about the zip doing up. Your only worry will be keeping them up because you’ll be so fit and healthy you’ll need to go down a dress size. Now there’s some food for thought.

by Cleo :)