When I was pregnant with my first daughter in 2001 I discovered an amazing flavor of Haagen Dazs ice cream called Belgian Chocolate. I don’t know if any of you have ever tried it before but it’s absolutely delicious: creamy, chocolatey, with subtle little slivers of dark Belgian chocolate mixed in. It’s amazing.
I don’t recommend eating at night!
And I ate it A LOT when I was pregnant
By the time my daughter was born the ice cream had became my master
But it was my friend, really. Because you see after a long day of being alone with the baby, being tired, and getting spit up on and pooped on, I was ready for a treat.
As my daughter grew I developed the habit of eating that ice cream every single night.
And so began a 15-year long compulsive eating at night habit.
Today I am free of that habit but it took me 15 years to figure it out.
One big part of how I overcame this habit started out when I realized how important it is to eat nutritious foods.
When I say “Eat Nutritious”, it could mean different things to each person. What works for you won’t necessarily work (probably won’t work) for the next person.
But the one thing that I can say that applies to all people, is that whole foods are superior to processed foods.
I mean this!
If you were willing to make only one BIG change in your life to increase your nutrition and improve your health, it should be to eat more whole foods and less processed foods.
If I could wave a magic wand and have you suddenly eating only 5% processed foods and 95% whole foods, your whole body would change.
That’s how powerful it is.
You may be wondering what a whole food is and what a processed food is.
Well, think about it this way, the closer something is to its original form, the less processed it is. And the more unrecognizable something is, the more processed it is.
If something has no ingredient list it’s probably not processed. If it has a long list of ingredients, especially ones you don’t recognize, then it’s probably highly processed.
I suggest you start by just observing what you eat for a week. Make note of all the processed foods. Then make a plan to change just ONE of those foods and replace it with a whole food.
If you normally snack on a protein bar, switch it to nuts. If you normally eat white bread with your breakfast, get some whole grain sourdough bread. If you normally buy canned soup, how about making a big batch of homemade soup and freezing it for later convenient use?
Back to my story of my compulsive eating habit. After I had been eating every single night for several years I began to learn how important it was to eat whole foods and nutritious foods. I was in graduate school for nutrition at the time.
When I learned this I began to change what I ate at night to whole foods rather than factory farmed Haagen Dazs ice cream.
I was evolving with this issue but I still didn’t really understand how bad it was to eat at night or to have this compulsive habit.
In the next post I will tell you about the next thing I did to overcome my compulsive eating habit.
Space is limited so check it out soon!
In Food Boss I will walk you through how to transform your relationship with food using the 3 steps I used to overcome my 15-year long compulsive nighttime eating habit, starting with EAT NUTRITIOUS!
