Before I lost my weight, I used to have a little ritual. At night, I'd wait until my husband took our son upstairs for bed. Then, I'd sneak to the freezer and eat ice cream straight from the carton.

I ate in secret because I didn't want my husband to see how much ice cream I could put away by myself.

Sound familiar? The guilt of hiding wrappers in the bottom of the trash. The shame of promising yourself "tomorrow will be different" while you're still eating. The exhaustion of starting over every day.

You're not "bad" if you overeat at night. There are so many reasons women do! In today's episode, Meeting Your Nighttime Needs Without Food, I'm sharing:

• 5 types of nighttime eating (the last one might surprise you)
• Why you really can't stop eating at night
• 3 simple steps to break free from nighttime binges

If you overeat at night, you're not broken and you're not alone. Tune in to know what's really going on (and how to stop the cycle):

Knowing why you eat at night helps you find what you really need. It might be rest, comfort, or just a moment to breathe. And as you figure it out, you'll lose weight in the process.

Let's talk about nighttime eating nighttime meltdowns. The first thing is there are a lot of reasons why we have these nighttime eating. Literally, the way that I define it is not just your 8:00 PM eating. It's not just what happens after dinner. It is from the time you would consider I get home or I start my evening. So if you work, we know when that is. You're just coming home. If you have kids at home and you stay at home with them, it's that time where you feel like is about the end of the day. Or it could be if you have a partner, if you're lucky enough to have a partner helping you with kids, then it's the time when they come home. It's kind of that whole transition period. Okay, so the first reason why it could be hard at night is we do something called rebel eating. 

And rebel eating is where you, it's like you feel as if you almost get mad at your plan or you get mad that you have to stop eating and something inside you is throwing a teenager bitch fit. It's like this isn't fair. I don't want to be told what to eat all the time. Even if you are the one telling you it doesn't matter in your subconscious, I want you to think about if this is you, let's pretend all shitty is our rebel. Just I'm a rebel. And so he's sitting there and he's throwing shit at you. 

You don't want to be told what to do. You've had to give to everybody else today. It's just your time. Whatever he is saying to you, the rebel comes out because you feel like when you are throughout your day, usually you feel as if you're being told what to do all day long. A lot of times it can come from if you go to work and you just take it in the ass all the time. Or if you're a people pleaser, a lot of people pleasers, even though they're the ones saying yes and everything, they don't feel like they can say no. So I want you to think about that. People pleasers can say no, they just don't have the courage or they have a lot of fear around saying no. They're terrified of hurting people's feelings or they think no one will support them. 

So why bother people? Pleasers often are some of the most rebellious eaters at night because they spend day in this really real feeling story that I can't say no, these are the things I just have to do every day. When you spend all of your time feeling like you don't have choice, you don't have opportunity, you don't get to do for you. You will want to eat at night as a sign of rebellion. It's the only time where you take back control. Now your eating may feel out of control and stuff, but the decision to do it, it's like this is the one time during the day I get to say no to something. Even if the thing you're saying no to is something at 8:00 AM you really want, and at 8:00 PM you're saying no to her, you're like, you can't tell me what to do. 

You don't know what kind of day I've had. You just don't understand the other way that the rebel eating, if none of that necessarily resonates. Rebel eating also happens this way. You may actually not be a people pleaser now, but a lot of rebel eating is stemmed from past diet trauma, especially in the youth. So it's very much rooted in our childhood experiences around food. So if you grew up, for instance, like me, I grew up very overweight and very often being put on a diet and my mom didn't know that she going, hell, we didn't even know about diet trauma and shit back in the eighties. She just thought, oh my gosh, she's getting bullied at school. And in her mind, my mom was just like, she was divorced young with kids and in her mind, she must've told me a thousand times that she told me one time, you're going to have to find a good man because in her mind, the only way for a woman to have any kind of financial security was to find a man and get married, find a good man. 

I was raised with that. And so when she would put me on diets, part of it was she was afraid I wouldn't be able to find a good man. Now I know that all of us looking back we're just like, wow. Oh my God, some of us are angry about that stuff. I am. I have a wealth of compassion for where my mother was coming from at the time I was angry. I've already spent my years being mad about it, but now when I look back on it, I have really, really thought about why would my mother act this way? Why would she say these things? Because her perspective was very different than mine, and that brought me a lot of peace. But for a while it was really hard for me to lose weight because I would get on a diet and stuff and eventually I would want to rebel because I didn't want food taken away from me like it was when I was a kid. 

I remember times going out to eat and my brother being able to order dessert and stuff and me not being able to order. If we were on a diet, I was told no, if we were off a diet, it was all eat all you want. But for a lot of people, for you, if you grew up and you were constantly having your favorite foods taken away, you had a lot of restrictive rules. Maybe you diet as an adult, there is the rebel living in you for y'all, for all of you. There's that person living in you and then when you're trying to make your plans and you are doing the things in no bs, she's thinking somebody's trying to tell us what to do, they just want us to lose weight because they think we're fat. Whatever it is, you have to talk to that inner voice. 

This is where we want to figure out if I've got a rebel in me, I've got to now start talking to that voice. So when you make your plan each day, let's say you are going to want to talk to that voice and say, now the biggest, you know how the plan, I always ask, what's the biggest obstacle I'm going to face today? You're probably going to put my rebel voice. The biggest obstacle I'm going to have tonight is the part of me that feels like she has to give all day and has no opportunity to tell anyone. No. So if all I'm really looking for is an opportunity to voice, say no, it would be really good for me to do two things. Number one, tonight, don't tell myself no, tell myself why we're going to say no to sabotaging our dreams. That our dreams are where we get to have some control and authority in life. We're not saying no to food. We're saying yes to our dreams. You have to think about what the rebel really wants. Then the other thing is if the big obstacle is going to be the rebel voice, the most important work to do not with your food plan you eating at night is the flare gun from the inside that's saying, I want you to start looking at your life. I want you to see is there places where you can say no. You can ask for help where you might not have to do it all yourself. 

That's what that voice is really, really trying to tell you. That's why it's important that y'all are in no BS and not out in the cold world doing Weight Watchers or some other bullshit program that doesn't address these things. Because what happens is when y'all want to try going, let's just say we're going to go count some points. We are going to get the MyFitness power working again. We're going to do whatever it is over here. Yeah, you count points and stuff, it'll tell you what you can and can't have at night, but do you think you're rebel voice respects that you enjoy a good three or four weeks of success and then ba, I'm coming for you. That's what happens. So don't fool yourself into thinking that you were going to get some kind of free pass and not work on all these things. 

All right, here's the next reason why we have a meltdown at night. Number two is comfort eating. Very similar to rebel eating. The rebel is got a reason why the rebel's popping up. Just like comfort eating has a reason why comfort eating pops up. So comfort eating at night is usually, it's like if we're eating at night, if you feel like you do not know how to soothe yourself, that is one reason why you'll want to eat soothing yourself would be having a bad day. And the only way you know how to deal with it is by eating at night. And so the day is just terrible shit's hit the fan, whatever, or it's not even an extraordinary day, but most nights you need comfort because you stay very anxious and jacked up all day long. I always liken it to, you're like my cat, nacho, nacho probably could Nacho needs coach. Kathy, let's just be honest, Nacho's nervous system stays very dysregulated. He's a scaredy cat. 

He walks around this house as if Cujo is around the corner all the time. He always is anxious and he looks that way and he will not let anybody pet him. Sweetest boy in the world, very good cat, but he even sleeps in a little dark room all by himself underneath a ski ball machine. He is just very, his nervous system is constantly, constantly stimulated. And so if during the day you are jacked, you worry about things. I always call it trying to read people's minds. You're always thinking, I bet they think this about me. I bet they think this about me. I bet they think this about me. I bet that means this. That is someone who is going to come home at night. And then when you come home, when you have been riding high with cortisol and adrenaline, the stress hormones all day long and not giving it a break when you get home, that stuff dumps really fast. 

So I'll give y'all example. When I do events and I stand on stage, this is a very common phenomenon for people who speak on stage or do concerts and whatnot, they get jacked up. That's pretty normal and their body over the course of an event, it just keeps like, we need more cortisol, we need more adrenaline, we need more cortisol, we need more adrenaline because you want to do a good job and all these other things. You got thousands of thoughts flowing in your brain all the time. Well, it ramps up like a roller coaster. So I want you to think about your day. You wake up at the bottom end of it, you're down here and you strap in for the day, and if you are an anxious person who worries about what people think and all that stuff all day long, you're just asking your body to pump more adrenaline, more cortisol. Well, when your day ends, your body doesn't be like, oh, let's just slowly let it all out. If it did that, you would not be nighttime eating. But here's what happens. You get ramped up and when you come home, it's just like going over the top on a rollercoaster. 

And so you dip below the line, all of that adrenaline, all that cortisol comes out. It's kind of like, have you ever been really, really busy doing something and then with you hadn't yawned nothing, and then about 15, 20 minutes later, suddenly you're like, oh my God, I'm so tired. It hits you how hard you've been working. It hits you how tired you are. That's the adrenaline and cortisol dump. So your body is terrible at letting it go. And so for me, when I used to do events until I knew this, I just thought something was wrong with me. I would come home and it would make sense that I'd be tired. I'd been standing on stage for three to five days and I'd come home and I'd go to bed, I'd be fine. I just got to go to bed. I just want to lay down and it felt like I should. 

But I always thought the next day it's like, well, we got to get back to work. It's time to get back to work. And the next day I would spend the entire day crying. Every little thing set me off. I would get mad easy, all these things because I had dumped all of that. I was still trying to just get back to a working level of cortisol. So rather than trying to force myself to keep working and stuff, I had to figure out, well, what is going on here? And when I realized I needed comfort, then I could figure out how to structure those days so I wasn't fighting with my family crying and eating for an entire day or two. So for you, when you are comfort eating at night, you have to think about what is it that I'm really needing? So that's a few things you can do. 

If you are a comfort eater, you can come up with a plan of how to deal with what I call a trough period when it's only happening each day and you come home rather than resetting back up with food, we have to think about what are our needs? What is it that we really need in those moments? Most of the time it is some actual break. And then that presents the problem of can you take a break without feeling guilty or lazy or unproductive? Because if that's the case, then now we know the next problem. So the first thing we have to do is we have to redefine rest to you that it's not a weakness, it's not a burden, it is not a bad thing. So if you have the ability to get rest, we work on not only putting it in, but it has to be put in the right way. Otherwise, if all you do is lay there and beat yourself up for being lazy, you'll quit resting, you'll go back to doing, and then you'll be back to eating. 

So simply by looking at the reasons why we eat and talking about it, we start uncovering all of these things that we can solve. Now, this comes from, I will tell you, the people who continually make their food plan and then assess and do discovery worksheets, find patterns faster and can overcome them faster than the people who do this. Make some plans when it's not perfect, give up, beat themselves up, then get a restart, and you're just trying to string together your highlight moments. It's like, if I could just get enough highlight moments together, no, that is not the answer to weight loss. You're never going to have enough moments to lose weight. No one is. The answer to weight loss is to have all the moments and see where am I really good and where do I have opportunities to fix my life in a way that makes me feel better? If I do that, I don't have to rely on the food to feel better anymore. 

So with comfort eating, if you will, every night, try your best to not do it and figure out, I always find that the fastest way to figure out what's going on for you is to not eat at night and be miserable for a few nights and ask yourself, why am I so miserable? I am berating myself for this being hard. I am feeling guilty for actually giving myself what I need. It's hard for me because what I really need is actually sit my ass down and I refuse to do it. So I'm trying to do work while also not give myself relief. Probably one reason why it's so hard, it's the way I'm talking to myself about it. So all of those things can present when you're doing. Now, the next one is secret eating. So there is secret eating that we do, and this often happens at night. 

It can happen anytime during the day, but secret eating is where you are eating when everyone else has gone to bed, you're eating in secret. So some people actually go to a closet, some people will go to their pantry. Sometimes I used to secret eat by When I first started losing weight, I was a big nighttime secret eater, and so I didn't really want to eat in front of Chris. It was very obvious that I definitely, I mean, I was over 250 pounds, but I didn't want to eat in front of him. So when he would take the baby upstairs, I would go ba on my ice cream. I didn't mind eating some stuff in front of him, but there was two things. I didn't want him to see how much ice cream I would eat, but also I just wanted me time. I didn't want to eat all the food in front of him because I wanted to be by myself. I was not by myself ever. So there's a lot of reasons for my secret eating. 

The culprits of secret eating are typically over dieting throughout the day. This is a big reason why a lot of people secret eat is they will be real strict, real strict, real strict, and they'll be telling themselves, eat, I'm probably going to overeat tonight, so I better eat very little. Now to prepare for that, it's like that's not the answer, I promise all of you, the answer is learn how to eat what you need throughout the day. You will probably still overeat at night for a little bit, but it's really hard to break any type of nighttime eating. If you're going in with physiological, with physiological deprivation on top, you are never going to cut out enough during the day to overcome frenzied bingey or secret type eating at night. No way. In fact, the more you cut back during the day, usually you can say like, well, let's say you cut 300 calories during the day by shaving off some stuff to save up. 

I would almost guess that you will eat three times that much because you'll be eating so fast and you will be eating so carelessly that you will triple what you saved. So just keeping that math in mind gives you something to refute. When your brain is saying all day long, the answer to secret eating is to eat less during the day so that you can have all this at night because no, the answer is don't over diet during the day so that when we get to where we are going to combat our secret eating, we're not also going in under fueled, on top of under feeling. So the other thing about secret eating is a lot of people do the secret eating again because everybody else gets put first. So if you're someone who puts everybody else's needs above you, secret eating is like comfort eating. It is a pattern of eating that we have developed as a way to meet our basic human needs because we are not meeting them any other way. We are not meeting them because through boundaries, asking for help, prioritizing things, women are notorious about making everything important and equally as important. 

Whether or not your towels get folded, the sink is clean every night, it's not as important as you getting a few nights a week where you can just decompress and not care are those dishes. There's so many things that we do. It's like, are those things so important that it matters more than waking up every day disappointed again? And the only reason why you're disappointing yourself is not because you ate. You're disappointed. Yes, because last night you ate, but you only ate because you're not getting your needs met. So we want to start really solving what's going on. It's like eating secret eating and comfort eating. Both are types of eating that is like you're signaling. You have permission to rest right now and any other time you don't, and that's the problem we need to solve. Then the next one is deserve it Eating. So a lot of us are eating at night because we are doing deserve it, eating and deserve it. Eating is just like it sounds. You deserve this because. So a lot of us, what we do is we say, you deserve to go out to eat tonight because you've had a bad day. And what we want to do is we want to reteach ourselves. How do we want to treat ourselves in the moments when we feel under deserved? 

So if you only know to eat or if that's your big trigger, the first thing you have to figure out is where in life do I feel like I deserve better? And a lot of times it's with yourself. It's like you are accomplishing things, you're doing a good job, you're meeting goals. There's these things that you do really well in life, but you don't tell yourself that often enough. And I will tell you, the people who are the most guilty of not having acknowledgement for themselves are the people who say these words. Nobody supports me. 

My boss never tells me I do a good job. Only if my partner would say these things, people who say those things, almost always comfort, eat or I deserve it, eat. And that is because they are looking outside of themselves for their own recognition. I will be really honest with you, I used to so much crave other people's accolades and stuff. I mean, I lived for it. I worked so hard to get it. I cried for my dad's attention. I just wanted him to be proud. It's not even in my dad to be proud of me. I don't even know if my dad's proud of anything, honestly, other than I think he follows Alabama. He's probably proud of that team. I mean, it's just not any, he's not a mean man. But I grew up desperately wanting people to tell me I'm okay. And I spent most of my life trying so hard to get people to tell me I'm okay, and I have won things. 

I have been the best at things. I have had so much success. And it wasn't until about the last three or four years when I really decided I was done trying to get other people to tell me I was good enough. I was going to have to. I was just like, I've got to stop trying over there so hard because I don't think I'm good enough. And if I don't think I'm good enough, it will never matter what they say. And I promise you that that's the truth. How many of you actually have people in your life that will tell you you're such a good mom? And you'll say like, well, you didn't hear what I said the other day to my kids. Or they'll say, you're so beautiful. And you'll be like, well, I still got 20 pounds to lose. Or your boss will tell you, you did a great job and all you do is go back to your desk and sweat that you're going to screw up the next time. That is how we know that other people can give you the words and the phrases that you most want to hear, but it never works. You might feel good in the moment, but it's very fleeting because if you're craving it, it doesn't mean you need other people to tell you things. It means you're missing the mark somewhere internally. You are not doing it enough. 

The guy used to just want Chris to always tell me how beautiful I am. Chris is not one to tell me, Dick, seriously. The man loves me to death, does a lot of things for me, but he is never going to be like, oh my God, you look so good, or I really love the way you're doing your hair, and he's not going to tell me You're just so beautiful. He's just not going to sit around and do that. And if I needed him to do that, I would feel terrible all the time. And so when I decided, you know what? There's only one person in the world I need to look good to, and that is the person looking in the mirror. And I started making myself find my features that I loved admiring myself. I used to want people to admire me. And I was like, you don't even admire you when you look in the mirror. 

All you do is tear yourself apart. Why do you want all these other people to admire you when you're not doing it? And that's what I started realizing. And if I wanted to feel smart, people were telling me I was smart, and I was like, yeah, well, I didn't go to college. I had to start spending time working. And then at the end of the day going like, oh my God, you're so smart. I had to start getting excited about things that I was doing. If I taught a concept, I'd be like, oh my God, I'm so smart. What a non-fire call. I had to start doing that stuff now, believe this shit. I did not believe any of it in the beginning, but that is the antidote to deserve it. Eating is you have to figure out what is it that I think I really deserve? 

If I got what I thought I needed out of my accomplishments, what would be the words, the phrases, the things I'd be hearing, what are the feelings I would feel? And then you got to look at that and be like, am I even telling myself this stuff? Because you do know what you want. You just got to take time to write it down, and then you have to take time to start actively telling yourself that even if it feels gross, if you would like to see those things start going away. And then the last thing, the last one of the big reasons why we eat at night is what we call transition and second wind eating. This is where we're eating to avoid feeling lazy. We're eating to get a moment of relief before what we call second shift beginning. So this happens a lot with the teachers or shift workers, or you finish up one job and you're coming home and you're basically starting another one. 

Especially if you're, you're say you're trying to build a business. I know I have a lot of women in here who are trying to build a side business just naturally they follow me. This would be you. You would do second wind eating, or maybe you have a job that requires you also to do a lot of work at night. So you come home and then you've got this little bit of a lull, and then second shift has to start. So you either got to start working on your side hustle. You've got small kids, so now we got to start homework. We got to start baths, we got to start all this other shit. 

That's the only time you have to clean house or do whatever. A lot of people do what we call that transitional eating. So when you're doing that, I just want you to understand that most of the time in the transition, you're most needing a break, like second wind eating signals. You need a reset. And so you're eating to give yourself a reset. The eating is because you probably think you need to just get busy. You immediately go from one hard day to trying to kickstart the next hard day with the out giving yourself a buffer. So food becomes the buffer, and it's not because of the food. It's because for most of us, if we know we've got all these things to do at night, it's natural for our brain to come home and think we need to just get started. And if we don't get started, all our brain does is dread doing it or tell us we have to or tell us, you should get started right now because if you don't, you're just being lazy. 

That transitional conversation is what has to change because it's that conversation between the two is what's jacking you up and making you go eat to get relief. Because who wants to feel lazy, unproductive, guilty, selfish, nobody. So we eat to avoid those emotions because when we're eating, we're not focused on that instead of what the simple solution is, rather than eating to avoid those emotions, we're going to reconstruct the conversation because it's bullshit. You are not being lazy. Here's what I know. Anybody that works a full day, whether you're working a full day at a job or you're working a full day with kids, because for me, I used to transition eat when Chris first got home, he'd mess with Logan and I would just have a snack or two, then we would eat dinner. During that middle part, I just thought I should be cooking dinner. I just thought I should be doing all these things, and it's that conversation I had to redefine. It's like Corrin, you are on all day for another human all day. It's normal. I don't care if he has been at work all day. We both have been stressed all day long. 

For me, I had to tell myself, this is not a weakness. He can come home some days and be on while you take a break, just like there's some days he's going to come home and need a break and you can keep going. When I had that conversation with myself that this is not a bad thing, then the days when I need to keep going, it didn't feel oppressive. It felt like today I got this. Chris needs it more than me today. That was very different than I shouldn't ask for this. I should feel guilty for this. So that is the other thing. It's the transition of the second eating. So rebel eating, comfort eating, deserve it, eating secret eating and transition eating. Those are the big reasons why nighttime meltdowns tend to happen. Here's my quick and best advice. We're going to go through this really fast. 

First, I want you to attempt to close the kitchen, not from punishing yourself. And I do not want people sitting there doing this through willpower, but I want you to tell yourself, I'm going to have a mental boundary of the kitchen is closed because there's really nothing wrong with eating after dinner if you're actually hungry, eat. But I want you to just have a mental construct of if I think I'm really doing this emotional style eating, I want to start closing my kitchen and instead of eating, I want to figure out why I need it so much. So the second step is really just going through and saying, I'm going to watch myself. What are my emotional needs? This is the thing I want all of you to walk away with. You don't just listen to this and be like, I should be perfect. This opens up the door to see what's really been going on. 

Now it's your job to take a step through the door and work on what's really going on. And then I just want all of you to imagine for a moment, six months from now, I want you to think about which one of these you identified with. And six months from now, we're not going to picture you not time eating anymore. I want you to imagine your life in six months from now that you're not eating anymore because you solved the problem. You didn't end the eating, you solved the root problem. Now, what's different in your life? I don't want to hear weight loss because yeah, if you're not in that time eating, you'll probably lose some weight and stuff. I want to know what is different about your life. 

When you have solved your own self gratification, you now no longer rely on other people to support you because you're so, what is it like in six months when you have nights you have help and you don't feel guilty? What is it like in six months from now when you are sitting around taking a much needed break and some nights helping out your partner because you actually have enough energy to where the load isn't just all on you? Now both of y'all are splitting it. I just want you to be thinking about that because we get so caught up in thinking that we have to just, I just need to stop the eating at night. No, we got to stop the bleeding that is causing you to need to eat at night. That's what we want to work on. All right, everybody. Y'all have a good one. Bye y'all.