What's your eating style?

The second and ultimately more important thing that Jenny did was to start questioning her work life. Why was she at the office so late every night? Looking at her eating habits made her look at her work habits, and she realized she was working her life away. She cut back on her hours at the office by cutting out unnecessary meetings from her schedule. That helped her have dinner at a more reasonable time and to spend more time with her friends and boyfriend. Combined with eating in-office meals on the occasional nights when she still had to work late, that did the trick: Jenny quickly lost ten pounds.

Emotional Eater

When Suzanne first came to me hoping to lose the fifteen extra pounds she'd been carrying around, I had trouble figuring out why she was overweight. She was a dedicated exerciser and maintained a nearly perfect diet. But then I found out that two or three times a week, she would binge right before bedtime. And I mean really binge. Suzanne was capable of downing a pint of premium ice cream (the kind that's super high in fat) or half a bakery cake at one sitting. Because she ate a normal number of calories throughout the day, it was clear to me that these eating episodes were related not to physical hunger, but rather to emotional hunger. And as I got to know her better, I discovered that she indeed had a void in her life.

The nighttime binges had begun after she got divorced and had continued through several years of unsatisfying dates and relationships. To stop the binges, Suzanne needed to first make the connection between her eating and her love life, then find a way to get fulfillment from something other than food. It took a lot of hard work. She started keeping a journal to help her understand the feelings that triggered binges and seeing a therapist to talk about the void in her life. A year later, she met a man and got remarried. By this time she had stopped her bingeing and, not surprisingly, had lost the extra fifteen pounds.

Occasionally, I come across someone who snacks late at night out of true physical hunger -- someone, that is, who just doesn't organize her meals well and as a result really feels the need to eat late into the evening. But mostly I see late-night snackers who eat out of habit and snackers who are emotional eaters, who eat to anesthetize themselves.

I used to fall into the habitual snacker category. I often tell the story of how, when I was growing up, my family would sit down together before bed and have a communal pre-bedtime snack. My mom, dad, sister, and I, usually clad in our pajamas, would gather around the table and have something like milk and cookies, ice cream, or hot chocolate, then roll off to bed happy and full. Back then, it seemed like a healthy thing to do, especially if the snack involved milk, which we were told would help us sleep (that part, at least, is somewhat true, since milk contains the natural sedative tryptophan). But to me, the best nights involved pie. I loved it then, and I love it now! To this day, whenever I'm offered a slice, I'm tempted to indulge and have a hard time passing it up. But I suspect that's mostly because I associate it with those intimate, comforting evenings I spent with my family.

I still crave that comforting ritual, but I've found a fulfilling substitute for the sweets: chamomile tea. I really relish that time of day when I'm able to sit down with something warm and calming, and the tea-drinking ritual allows me to preserve my family tradition in a much healthier (and far less caloric) way. When I go to bed, I feel satisfied but not stuffed the way I used to. As a result, I fall asleep more easily and get a better night's sleep.

Habit was half of my problem; emotional attachment to the tradition was the other half. I find that many people share this emotional attachment to late-night eating. They're not physically hungry when they eat; they're using food for emotional sustenance. Many of these emotional eaters do okay during the day, but at night they have time to reflect on what's wrong in their lives, and that sets the ball rolling. Suddenly, stress, anger, sadness -- all the things that have been hidden under the surface during the day -- boil over, leaving them desperate for something to wash the discomfort away. Food, handy and comforting, seems like the perfect remedy, but it's really just a bandage that masks, not solves, the problem. In fact, most emotional eaters ultimately find little pleasure in their late-night snacks, and they feel worse knowing that they're adding to their weight problems with every bite.

There are various degrees of emotional eating. Some people just feel a little discontented (or bored), so they'll eat a few cookies to distract themselves for a while. Others are in deep pain, which leads them to seriously abuse food. For them, it takes a lot more than cookies to fill the void they feel inside.

But whichever category you fall into -- or perhaps you fall somewhere in between -- it's imperative to address the reasons behind your emotional eating. In order to lose weight, you have to have a healthy relationship with food, and that means seeing food for what it is -- a source of sustenance, nutrition, and enjoyment, but not a source of emotional fulfillment.

I don't want this to sound flippant, as if I think it's easy to give up using food for solace. I know it's not, and I don't want you -- and this is important -- to feel guilty or distressed about your desire to eat. But I do want to encourage you to seize this chance to understand why you turn to food. It's an incredible opportunity to change your life significantly. Working on your weight is actually working on your life -- and that's what Get With the Program! is all about. Get in touch with your inner self, and the outer self will follow.

To succeed at weight loss, you'll need to stop eating two, preferably three, hours before going to sleep. You may feel slightly hungry, but that's exactly how I want you to feel. I never want you to feel ravenous when you go to bed at night. But wanting a little something is just fine. When you're trying to lose weight, slipping into bed at night feeling slightly hungry (the British have a perfect word for it -- peckish) is actually a good thing. It's your body telling you that what you did that day is working -- you're losing body fat. If you don't feel this way, you're probably not losing fat.

Start with a cutoff time of two hours before bed; then, as it becomes easier, see if you can stop eating two and a half hours presleep. If you can make it to three hours, even better. This little step can have a big payoff. A large percentage of my clients have found that establishing a cutoff time was all they needed to do to meet their weight loss goals. Others have needed to make additional changes as well, but everybody who quit late-night eating found that it translated into some weight loss. If you want to shed some pounds, go to bed feeling a little peckish. I'm confident that you'll see results.

Why It's Good to Be Just a Little Hungry at Bedtime

I want to reiterate that I don't advocate going to bed feeling starved. If you are voraciously hungry, it means that you didn't do a good job of managing your meals throughout the day. Perhaps you skipped breakfast or another meal, or maybe you just skimped on calories all day long. Either way, you may feel virtuous, but it just means that you missed a number of opportunities to give your metabolism a boost by eating. It also means that by allowing yourself to get ravenous, you may be setting yourself up for a binge. What I want you to feel instead is slight hunger. That feeling is your brain saying, "Feed me or I'm going to dip into your fat stores for energy." That, of course, is exactly what you want to happen. It's your guarantee that your body is burning the fat you are working hard to lose.

If, on the other hand, you follow your brain's directive and eat close to bedtime, your body will not dip into the fat it has stored away, and will probably even store some more. Every time you eat, your metabolism increases slightly. But this effect is lost or minimized late at night. You don't get the same metabolism-boosting benefit when you eat just before bed, because a couple of hours after dinner, your body begins preparing for sleep. This natural slackening of your metabolic rate overrides any metabolic boost you might get from eating. So once you hit the pillow, the only calories you're going to use are the basic calories you need to keep your heart beating and your lungs breathing and allow your eyes to move in REM sleep. And that, all told, is a minimal number of calories.

You also won't take advantage of the energizing effects of eating. Had you eaten 300 calories in the morning instead of just before going to sleep, you'd feel invigorated and would move more throughout the day, burning those calories. But when you're downshifting into bedtime mode, you're going to feel too sleepy to increase your activity. The opportunity to burn off those 300 calories is lost.

Believe it or not, eating late at night can also inhibit your calorie-burning potential the next day. Say, for instance, that you treat yourself to a big bowl of cereal topped with sliced bananas at 10 P.M. one night and are fast asleep by eleven. When your alarm goes off the next morning at seven, the last thing on your mind is going to be breakfast -- you're still full from the cereal and bananas you ate the night before. Chances are, you're going to skip breakfast and lose all the metabolism-boosting benefits you'd get from eating a morning meal.

During sleep, digestion all but shuts down so that the food you've consumed has extended contact time with your digestive tract. That may increase your risk of various ailments and disease, including certain cancers. Consider, too, that fat and protein take longer than carbohydrate to digest so if you snack on a bowl of ice cream or a steak sandwich before bed, the contact time may be even longer. Eating late can also just make you feel plain lousy. It's harder to get a good night's sleep on a full stomach, and it makes you more susceptible to heartburn.

If your day goes according to plan, you'll expend more energy than you consume. And that's great -- it means that you will burn body fat. It also means that, at least in the beginning, you will feel a twinge of hunger at night. If you're not used to it, it can make you very uncomfortable. This is a time when you really need to hang in there. As you become used to adhering to an eating cutoff time, your body will adapt and the uncomfortable feelings will pass.

It's just like training your body through exercise: the first day that you laced up your sneakers, put the treadmill on a hill setting, and began walking, you probably felt uncomfortable (and probably didn't like it). But that's what exercise training is: the gradual introduction of slight discomfort in order to make changes such as enhanced cardiovascular efficiency, greater muscle strength, and a stronger body overall. Another of those changes is increased tolerance. After jumping on the treadmill many times, it's going to feel less taxing; your body has adapted to the positive stress. You'll think back to the time when you were walking on a flat treadmill at a much pokier speed and wonder how you could have ever thought it was hard!

There are many other areas of our lives where we start out feeling uncomfortable with something, only, over time, to get to a point where it doesn't bother us -- we may even come to like it. I remember once going out to dinner with a client who raved about the restaurant's asparagus soup. It was very rich and creamy, but since this was her last hurrah before we started to work together, she decided to order it. And she wasn't disappointed. To her, it tasted great.

Fast-forward to a year later. By this time we had weaned her from a diet of mostly rich, high-fat foods, but when we went back to the restaurant, she decided to order the asparagus soup again. Only this time she found it totally unappetizing. Her palate had become much more sensitized to fat, so that what used to taste delicious now tasted too rich.

It works this way with a lot of foods. Switch from heavily salted dishes to lightly salted dishes, and after a while, you'll probably find the heavily salted versions too hard to take. You'll be so sensitive to sodium that you'll even start tasting the natural sodium contained in foods such as broccoli. It works the opposite way, too. Keep adding salt to your food, and you'll eventually become desensitized to it -- you won't taste the salt even though it's there in abundance.

There's a word for the process of going through a period of discomfort, then adjusting to what's causing the stress; habituation. When continually exposed to just about anything we have the ability to adjust and develop a tolerance. That's what going to happen when you begin nixing late-night eating. You'll find it uncomfortable at first, but you'll adjust. Yet even though your body has this remarkable ability to adapt, I still suggest that you take it slowly. Start with a two-hour cutoff time and honor it. Then see how much further you can cut back. Go to two and a half hours. If you can make it to three, great! Have patience, and you will prevail.

• Replace a late-night snack with a cup of herbal tea. This, as you know, is my personal strategy, but I find that it also works for a lot of other people. The warmth of a cup of herbal tea (I find chamomile especially calming) is comforting, and the liquid helps give you a feeling of fullness. And if it's boredom that is driving you to eat, the tea will help keep you busy until the urge to eat passes. The ritual of tea drinking also gives you time to reflect on your day and set your personal goals for tomorrow.

• Write! You might even combine writing with tea drinking, since tea can put you in a contemplative mood. But even if you're not a tea drinker, writing is a good way to foil late-night snacking. Jot down what you're feeling -- it may convince you that maybe what you need is not a bag of potato chips but a phone call to a good friend to talk about what's bothering you. Write about the ways you want to improve your life and what you think can help you do so.

• Keep yourself busy. Boredom is the enemy of all late-night eaters. Read a book, watch a movie (though not if you're the kind of person who associates TV with snacking), take a bath, challenge someone in your family to a card game, listen to music, put pictures in a photo album, surf the Internet. If it's safe, go for a walk by yourself or with someone else. Choose something that enriches your life in some way so that it's not simply a substitute for eating that you will ultimately throw aside. If the activity you opt for is absorbing and enriching, your cravings will most likely dissipate.

• Close the day by renewing your commitment to yourself. You did it first thing in the morning; now do it again at night. Review your day. What did you do right? What needs to change?

Four tips to end late night snacking

1. The more frequently you eat, the more often you'll give your metabolism a boost. You might think that you're doing yourself a favor by skipping meals. You might even feel as though you're doing yourself a favor by not eating until dinner. But physiology dictates that eating -- and eating often -- is actually a better strategy. Eating has a stimulating effect on the metabolism, increasing the rate at which you burn calories for some time after a meal. Eat often, and your metabolism will operate at its maximum speed all day long.

2. Calories eaten earlier in the day boost the metabolism more than calories eaten later in the day. When you eat, you increase the rate at which you burn calories, but your metabolism still has a natural arc to it and it declines as it gets closer to bedtime. For that reason, it may be that the food you eat in the evening doesn't increase your calorie-burning ability as much as the food you eat earlier in the day. Once it's settled into its resting mode, your body is resistant to being revved up at night.

3. Eating makes you feel more energetic during the day but not, typically, at night. Have you ever finished dinner and thought to yourself, "I feel as if I could run a few miles! " I didn't think so. Most people feel fairly lethargic after dinner. One reason is that they've usually eaten too much and their bodies are hard at work digesting the food, leaving little energy for anything else. (This is especially true when the meal is high in fat and protein, which take more energy to digest than carbohydrates.) Another is that the body begins to wind down in the evening, preparing you for sleep.

4. Eating the majority of your calories at one meal can create an insulin spike, causing the body to store fat. When you take in a large number of calories -- and, in particular, carbohydrate calories -- a signal is sent to your brain, which then sends a message to your pancreas to pump out more insulin. That big dose of insulin is going to cause your body to store many of those calories as fat (insulin, you'll remember, is responsible for taking glucose out of the bloodstream and depositing it into fat storage). The majority of people eat their biggest meal at dinner time, but having an oversized meal any time of day can cause an insulin spike. If, however, you spread out the calories over many hours, your insulin level will stay steady and your body will be less likely to hoard fat.

You should eat three meals -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner -- plus two snacks -- midmorning and midafternoon -- a day. I suggest that you try to make each meal 25 to 30 percent of your total daily calories, with snacks making up the remaining 10 to 25 percent. The size of the portions will vary according to the number of calories you individually need to eat in a day. If you're inclined to make one meal bigger than the others, make that larger meal lunch. That way you'll still have half a day to burn off the extra calories.

Here is an example of what kinds of meals and snacks make up a well-proportioned day.

Breakfast

• A bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and sliced strawberries.
  or
• Low-sugar cereal mix with 1 percent or skim milk and a glass of orange or grapefruit juice.
  or
• Egg-white omelet filled with onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers.

Lunch

• White-meat turkey or chicken sandwich on whole-grain bread and a cup of tomato-basil soup.
  or
• Salad with assorted vegetables, canned tuna and low-fat dressing.
  or
• Teriyaki fish or chicken with brown rice and vegetables.

Dinner

• Pasta with chicken and broccoli and a garden salad.
  or
• Fish with salsa, grilled asparagus, and brown rice.
  or
• Couscous with curried vegetables and a cup of spinach soup

Snacks

Choose one from this list, twice a day:

• Raw vegetables and fat-free ranch dressing
  
• Fruit
  
• One ounce of pretzels
  
• Air-popped popcorn topped with Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, or, cayenne pepper
  
• Soup (not cream-based)
  
• A small or medium baked potato topped with salsa
  
• A small or medium baked sweet potato
  
• A low-fat frozen yogurt bar
  
• A frozen fruit bar
  
• Low-fat or fat-free yogurt with one teaspoon of maple syrup and sliced bananas
  
• One cup of steamed edamame
  
• One cup of brown rice
  
• One ounce of raw walnuts, almonds, or cashews
  
• One ounce of low-fat cheese
  
• A low-fat cookie