Let’s paint a picture: you eat a light breakfast, a healthy lunch, you hold yourself off ‘till dinner where you have a meal that you’re proud of…you clean up, sit down to relax, and then it hits: a growing urge that niggles at your brain and tells you to go raid the pantry. Before you know it you feel like you’ve ruined your day, your mind is going through all the scripts of guilt and shame, your body feels heavy and sluggish and you’re promising yourself you’ll do better tomorrow.

Personally, I can speak from experience with this topic because this was my life for over 6 years; I remember very well how out of control and frustrating this cycle feels. I used to be so on point during the day, everything was so carefully planned and tracked and accounted for, I’d exercise feel really good, and then nighttime hit and it all came crashing down. I felt so at a loss for how to fix this pattern- it felt like I was broken.

So let’s get into 5 reasons why you eat so healthy during the day and then end up bingeing at night, so you can figure out how to stop this cycle and get out of this habit.

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Reason #1: You’re calorie/macro/meal hoarding throughout the day

What I mean is that whether intentionally or unintentionally, you're saving all:

Your calories,
Or your macros (i.e. all your carbs),
Or your meals,
Or your fun and enjoyable and satisfying foods,
…for the end of the day.

If this feels like you, what ends up happening is that you get into this cycle where you’re fighting off the urge to eat when you're actually feeling hungry. You might be feeling like that's a positive thing to do- maybe it even feels safe to do that.

But think about it in this way: what if you avoided the urge to go to the bathroom? I’m talking pee or poo. Completely normal bodily functions. What would happen? How would you feel? At first it might be okay but eventually, you’re going to feel like you’ll burst. It’s going to be all you can think about; you might even lose control of your body. It’s a silly thing to do! Just listen to your body and go to the bathroom.

The same thing happens when you’re ignoring our body's cues to eat. When you do this and macro hoard or calorie hoard or hoard all the enjoyable food for the evening, you become so hungry- it’s a primal hunger. So you end up binging or overeating.

The same thing happens when you avoid eating the foods you actually enjoy until the evening- you put them on this pedestal and you make them out to be a reward, which they’re not. They’re just food! Looking at them this way creates restriction and this pent up internal pressure. If we can start to work in sync with our body and it's cues, eat when we're hungry, give ourselves permission so we can figure out what food choices feels good physically and mentally in the moment, we will begin to have a more regulated nervous system, more regulated hormones, and more regulated hunger, fullness, and satiety cues.

Believe me- I know it's scary when you are in this place of feeling like you’d eat so much and you’d never stop if you started letting yourself eat when you’re hungry or if you let yourself have a couple cookies during the day. It’s really scary when you’re in that place- I was there too! But, we have to go through this process of releasing all this internal pressure that has got us so disconnected from being in our body's natural rhythm and natural cycles.

Reason #2: You’re burnt out and your tank is just totally empty

Another reason why you might be eating healthy during the day and bingeing at night is because you’re burnt out. You’re running on empty. You want to decompress, you want to relax, you want to numb out from the day. You've been going all day long, you want to relax or numb out and food is the one thing that’s helping you relax. Without realizing, you might be using food to try and give you more energy rather than giving yourself what you actually need, which is to learn how to set more boundaries and to stop stretching yourself so thin. As a result, you need to shut our brain off from it all and use food as a way to do that.

To heal this pattern, you have to stop saying yes to everything to learn to prioritize. Just because you might have the time on your calendar does not mean it should always be filled with something. Your body is not meant to go at the pace that you are continuing to try and push yourself to go at. It’s almost like you’re addicted to being in a constant state of go go go. It’s not your fault- our culture has created that reality for us.

Think about your life where you are feeling stretched, and then exhausted. Where can you start to say no? I don't know your lived experience, but my encouragement to you is to look for little places where you can begin to say no and you can begin to rest a little bit more. What little things can you take off your plate? What's something you can take off your to-do list that doesn't have to be done right now?

We have to start prioritizing rest a little bit more. That will help immensely with your eating because you won’t always need to use food to relieve that stress and that exhaustion- there’s less there to begin with.

Reason #3: You have a dysregulated nervous system

This next reason often teams up with reason 2, but reason number 3 why you might be eating healthy throughout the day and then bingeing at night, is because you might have a dysregulated nervous system.

You're overworked, you're stretched, thin, overwhelmed, exhausted all the time, you're feeling anxious. Going back to what we were talking about before, you might not have the boundaries to deal with any of this, so you’re going above and beyond, steamrolling yourself, saying yes to everything, and not paying attention to how it’s taking a toll on you (or you don’t know how to stop).

If you don't learn the tools to regulate your nervous system on top of setting boundaries, it ends up feeling like your nerves are on the fritz- you're overwhelmed, you wake up feeling anxious, and it’s like one thing sends you over the edge into feeling like you can’t handle it anymore. This builds internal pressure that keep the cycles of binging and emotional overeating going.

So, you get to the end of the day and you just want to chill, but your unregulated nervous system comes out to play. It bubbles up to the surface, which causes these feelings of impulsiveness to find immediate relief. Right now, maybe the only way you know to calm these feelings or even avoid these feelings is food. You numb out. It gives you this dopamine release and this temporary euphoric experience.

Reason #4: Food is your number one source of comfort, pleasure and fulfillment

This reason comes up when food is your security blanket. If you're experiencing an overall lack of fulfillment and pleasure in other areas of our life, if you’re not fully able to express fulfillment, there’s a block there and you’re using food to relieve that pressure that a lack of fulfillment creates. If food is your main coping strategy, this is what you're going to turn to out of habit. We need comfort, we need to be able to relax, but if this is the only tool in your tool box to relax and tune out, it's an unhealthy coping strategy.

This could be one of the reasons that at the end of the night when your willpower, your discipline, your energy levels are low, you end up turning to food. Food is joyful. Don't get me wrong. But we don’t want it to be in this euphoric, rebellious, dark, “I need to eat it because I don't know when I'm gonna have it again” type of way.

It’s absolutely possible that food is a joy in your life; but if food is your only joy, your main source of pleasure, if you're unfulfilled in other areas of your life, then what happens is you try to fill your need for fulfillment in other parts of your life with food. You may be distracted from this throughout the day, but then nighttime comes and the emptiness starts to bubble up. You're exhausted, you're tired, you feel like life is mundane, you’re stuck in this mediocre pattern, and you turn to food to fill these emotional voids or to avoid these feelings altogether.

And this can happen on a completely subconscious level- you might not realize this is happening. Fulfillment is so important in our lives. As humans, every single one of us need to prioritize fulfillment. Whether in your work, your relationship, your hobbies, your social life, your family, whatever it is- think about all those areas and whether they light you up (or not) and feel aligned. You might not feel fulfilled in every single area- that’s okay, unless you totally hate it like and it drains you- in which case that intense lack of fulfillment might steamroll those other areas where you do feel fulfilled and create that need to soothe with food in the evening.

Take inventory of all those areas, whether you feel fulfillment, and perhaps highlight areas you need to work on in your life so that you need to rely less on food to fill that void.

Reason #5: You’re relying on willpower for healthy eating

With this reason, you might not binge during the day (or be less likely to binge during the day) because when you wake up in the morning, your brain and body are relatively well rested. That's when we have access to the most amount of willpower and discipline. As we go through our day, we use up all that energy and the reserves get smaller and smaller. Willpower is a finite resource- we don’t have unlimited amounts of it. So many of us use it to get out of bed, to go to work, to not lose it on your coworker, so many things use up your willpower.

When it comes to food, if you’re relying on willpower, it’s unreliable and it comes back to bite you in the butt. Willpower is something that we’re meant to use occasionally, when we absolutely need it for survival. It's not meant to be something that we rely on every day. Relying on it fatigues the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain responsible for impulse control, managing emotional reactions, decision making, working towards future goals, and other executive functions. So, we go home after a long and stressful day, we feel drained, and we just want to chill out so we turn to food because we can’t hold up that willpower anymore.

The key to stopping night binges after eating healthy all day? Become an expert of YOU.

In order to get out of this habit, you have to become an expert at listening to your body, developing higher levels of body awareness, and building your interoceptive awareness. True food freedom is when you no longer even feel the urges or impulses to binge- that's possible for you! You need to learn the tools to reprogram your mind around food, develop greater emotional coping skills, nervous system regulation, emotional regulation techniques through things like breath work, meditation, mindfulness, practicing pleasure, deep connection, and fulfillment.

I hope helps you understand yourself a little better and why you might be eating healthy throughout the day and then end up losing control and bingeing at night.

If you're looking to really dive into this and get more support, I'd love to work with you inside of The Empowered Eaters Collective, my food freedom online program. If you have any questions feel free to email me at brittanyallison.rd@gmail.com!

Until next time,

Britt

Time stamps

[00:01:53] Food habituation as a learned behaviour - what food habituation is and how it is an innate behaviour that can be unlearned. The cycle of restrict and binge and emphasizes that this is not a natural way of relating to food.

[00:03:48] Making peace with food and unconditional permission to eat, common concerns and exploring what making peace with food means for you.

[00:08:44] How listening to your body and not restricting yourself can lead to a healthier relationship with food and how it can help normalize certain foods and remove the power they have over us.

[00:10:36] How diets prevent food habituation, leading to a cycle of guilt and binge-eating.

[00:16:51] How restricting certain foods can lead to intense cravings and overconsumption when reintroduced.

[00:17:40] Discusses the process of making once forbidden foods a regular part of one's diet and building trust that they will always be available.

[00:19:26] Action steps for developing a healthier relationship with food - practical tips on giving oneself permission to eat, reminding that food is always accessible, and gradually reintroducing previously restricted foods.