My Best Way to Avoid Late Night Snacking
Fight one bad habit with a good one
Why is late night snacking bad?
Most of the evidence on eating late points to the fact that it disrupts your sleep. If you reach for the Snickers or bag of chips late into the evening, it might not be as satisfying when you’re tossing and turning some time later.
It also makes it pretty hard to commit to some sort of intermittent fasting. If you eat after 8 PM, and want to fast for 16 hours, you’re going to hit the afternoon before your first few calories. Trying to do this sort of fasting is hard enough, but pushing out your first meal to the afternoon is a guarantee that you probably won’t make it.
So what do I do?
When 8PM rolls around:
- Brush Your Teeth
- Floss
- Rinse with Mouthwash
If you don’t care about your teeth, then I’d build this habit up first. Dental care is probably way more important than even dentists make it out to be. Make sure you take the 2–5 minutes it takes to do these three pieces of tooth-care and make that part of your nightly routine.
Then move that ritual to the 8 O’Clock hour.
Why does this work?
You’ll find that you don’t want to eat because you don’t want to spend another 5 minutes making your teeth all fresh once again.
Also I find that if you do all 3 forms of dental care thoroughly, you get a bit nauseous. Just enough to make you not really want to reach for the bag of Lays, certainly not again.
Lastly that fresh feeling; you want it to last, and eating robs you of your hard earned fresh mouth.
Bonus: Use an out of sight shelf for snacks
I put all my good snacks on a high shelf or a low shelf, so even if I’m tempted to break through my dental-care forcefield, I don’t see them when I open the pantry up. My passive, bored and peckish self has to exert too much effort to late-night snack, so I give up and grab the gum that’s at eye level.
Fight one habit with another: brush your teeth early and deter yourself from another go at the out of sight snack items.
