In Defense of Midnight Snacks

  1. Kait says:

    Great post…and very timely, this happened to me yesterday!

    I ate a breakfast, some lunch but couldn’t finish it, then waited waaaaay to long to have dinner and had one of those I’m so f-ing hungry I just ate a normal meal but I still need more and can’t stop eating kind of things and ate waaaaaay too much. Back in the day I would have called this a small binge and felt guilty for all the food I ate and probably just ate more because the diet mentality is so weird sometimes…but now I say F it! Yeah, I ate too much but it’s because I didn’t eat enough during the day and my body needed the food. Accepted 🙂

  2. Me too! If I have a grumbly tummy, sleep is not happening. Blame on me being fat, blame it on being food insecure as a kid, blame it on believing that going to bed hungry when you have access to food and are not nauseous is disordered eating.

    I have a whirli-pop to make popcorn very cheap, and it’s one of my favorite bedtime snacks! I also like lightly toasted bread (if we have the money i splurge on potato bread, Oh. My. Carb.), enjoy sunflower seeds, and occasionally kosher dill pickles (especially if i was sweaty that day) and rollo candies. I have found that following carb cravings before bed is especially important in reducing my “wake up in the middle of the night in full-blow migraine” episodes.

  3. graphxgrl says:

    Your website is a miracle to me, I have wanted to do this for the last year after reading “Weight Loss Apocalypse” and “Women, Food and God” but am still circling the drain of fear over weight gain. I just had to comment on this particular post because I hate and fear going to bed hungry but have been harboring serious Guilty feelings about it for YEARS. What? I don’t have to feel guilty about eating at 11pm? Wha? LOL Thank you thank you.

    • I never worried about going to bed hungry but I had a job for a number of years that necessitated working 14-hour days, during which I was always on my feet–a coworker wore a pedometer one day and discovered she’d walked seven miles in eight hours without leaving the building. That I could do that and still be overweight is a testament to just how much I was overdoing it. I’ve never had serious food issues (thank you to my non-dieting mother) but I developed a sort of preemptive eating habit because of my anxiety about being hungry during the long day.

      There was some kind of reverse thing going on here: Once I got over feeling like I needed to keep myself full in case I wouldn’t have time to eat later, I could suddenly stop eating when I was only comfortably full, instead of stuffed.

      I lost 35 pounds. With basically no effort.

      Okay, this doesn’t really follow, but my point was: I used to feel guilty. Don’t feel guilty. Eat something and sleep well.