From: Maureen Allen
Many people who struggle with their weight find evenings and nights especially difficult to keep out of the cupboard and refrigerator. Chips and dip or popcorn and soda go hand in hand with watching TV and unwinding at the end of a hard day. Some patients actually report waking from a deep sleep for the sole purpose of eating. It’s not uncommon for people to keep their calories in check and well within healthy limits all day to find their program derailed after dinner.
It’s such an insidious habit that one of Oprah’s top tenets of weight management from her Boot Camp program is to stop eating anything at 7:30 or three hours before going to bed at night. It doesn’t matter if Oprah’s had dinner or not!
Another approach is accepting that consuming calories at night is a style of eating and therefore budgeting calories and wholesome snacks accordingly. The point is, most patients view night-time eating as a diet buster and weight management challenge and are desperate for strategies to overcome the often destructive behavior.
Enter Taco Bell, the fast food chain and nutrition expert. Their unique approach is to create a fourth meal – the one between dinner and breakfast. Visit their website and, after registering your age and gender, you are invited to play a series of interactive games looking for prizes that are cheesy, crunchy, melty etc. You get the idea. Madison Avenue has now legitimized late night eating while we viewed it as a problem to be solved.
The fourth meal ad campaign isn’t going to make someone go out and eat at night. Just the way cigarette ads on TV didn’t make it OK to smoke.
