Do you feel like no matter how much you try you just can’t seem to stop overdoing it with the sweets? You are definitely not alone. So many clients come to us with this same struggle. I have found three major reasons for this:
Dieting strategies have made sweets seem so tantalizing that people find themselves wanting them simply because they think that they aren’t supposed to have them. This tends to create a “last supper” mentality when they finally do allow themselves to have them. What I mean by this is they avoid, avoid, avoid until they simply can’t anymore, give up, indulge and then once they start to indulge they don’t stop when they feel fulfilled, they keep going because they plan on never letting this happen again – and so the cycle continues.
This is the common culprit of nighttime eating and overconsumption of sweets. The issue isn’t the sweets or the cravings…it’s the fact that many people fast through breakfast, opt for a light lunch, and then nighttime rolls around and their energy needs catch up with them and biology takes over and causes them to intake the food that they should have had spread over the day.
This comes from eating unbalanced meals. This can happen even if people are eating in a health-conscious way. In fact, I’ve found that this is most often the case for clients who are trying certain diet fads or trends like intermittent fasting or macro tracking.
When our client joined Metabolism Makeover, she was able to learn more about her body and struggled less with overindulging ice cream. Over time, though, she found that it crept back in.
She dug a little deeper, and this is the exact strategy that she used to stop overeating ice cream…
Although she had made peace with most foods and was allowing herself to eat more, she was still mentally restricting ice cream. This means that she would allow herself to eat it, but the mental load of constantly thinking, “I don’t think I should be eating this” was weighing heavy on her and taking up way too much brain space. Instead, she gave herself unrestricted permission to have ice cream. Giving herself the permission made her think of it less. This alone took so much power away from the foods she “shouldn’t have” and gave it back to her.
This step isn’t necessary for everyone but it was for our client. She was finding that on days that she knew she was going to have ice cream, she was skipping dinner or would have a much smaller dinner to prepare for the ice cream (hi, super annoying voice from calorie counting days). Instead of thinking about calories or trying to “save” for the ice cream, she found a way to incorporate it into her meals or prepare herself with a balanced meal before.
This particular client realized that she was using ice cream as a way to cope with stress. This is extremely common. People use sweets, alcohol, doom scrolling, staying up late, and other things to cope with stress and the emotional load of the day. As soon as our client realized that some of her ice cream binges were associated with stress and as a way to unwind from the day she was able to find another way to cope with stress that didn’t involve the ice cream at all.
To sum it up, she stopped categorizing ice cream as “good” or “bad” and gave herself permission to have the food she loved. She then made sure that she was prioritizing meals that were balanced and provided the nutrients that her body most needed, instead of thinking simply about calories and choosing dessert over meals. And lastly, she got seriously honest with herself about how she was coping with stress. This was all much easier to do after she laid a solid foundation for herself with the basics; broke up with dieting, learned about the different macronutrients and how much her body needed, and started eating for blood sugar balance.
Now our client is able to eat and enjoy ice cream in a way that she feels good about! She is no longer late-night binging ice cream or feeling out of control around this food that she once felt powerless to. This wasn’t just the case for one client, we have tons of clients that feel the exact same way! If you are struggling with late-night snacking and feeling out of control around fun foods, then it is time to find a strategy that actually works for you!
Learn more about our next Metabolism Makeover here!
Your MM Coach,
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