I know this must sound funny- just stop eating at night- but it's not that simple. I don't just eat at night. I wake up in the middle of the night- STARVING- and I feel like I can't go back to sleep until I eat something. I try to eat healthily when I get up, but unfortunately all I crave are carbs. This syndrome is the number one reason why I don't keep cereal in the house; I will wake up and have a bowl (or two) every night. I know because it happened for almost a straight year in college.
I woke up and ate again last night, and after seeing a gain on my scale after working out twice a day for a week, I just about gave up. But then I realized even though I had been keeping my net calories to (around) 1200 a day and logging everything I ate, I hadn't really been logging what I ate in the middle of the night.
To give you an example, early this morning I ate three corn tortillas with margarine and jam... 372 calories worth. Add the 3 scrambled eggs I ate at 2am before I went to bed, and half of my daily calories are gone before I woke up for the day. No wonder I'm not losing weight... not to mention what this disorder is doing to my quality of sleep.
I went online and found some ideas on how to hopefully curb this: Make sure to eat breakfast, limit caffeine and alcohol, schedule specific times for meals and snacks, and try to talk yourself out of getting out of bed. Breathing exercises... all that. I'll be taking melatonin, too.
If you are not hungry in the mornings, can go almost all day without eating and then eat almost all your daily calories at/after dinner, you may have Night Eating Syndrome like me. It runs in families (my mom has it) and a large percent of sufferers also have some sort of anxiety/depression disorder (both mom and me.) It also comes out/worsens with stress... which is all of us.
For more info and a book, go to this CBS News link.
And if you or someone you know is dealing with this, please let me know!
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