We are now fully into the holiday season. It’s the time of year when we are inundated with treats, displays, parties, and leftover candy pretty much everywhere. You might currently find yourself trapped in a whirlwind of Thanksgiving plans and gatherings that will lead into a month of holiday parties, baking, and special treats everywhere - and this just continues into the new year.

When you struggle with emotional eating and food cravings, the holidays can feel overwhelming. If you struggle with stress and dread related to the holidays, this time of year can be particularly challenging.

I wanted to offer some support for anyone struggling with food triggers, holiday triggers, or a combination of both. Hopefully you can reference this post all throughout the season!

I recommend having a journal or your notes app handy and consider the following:

When you arrive at the end of the holiday season, when you are welcoming 2025, how do you want to feel?

What is one small, doable, and desirable goal that you can set for yourself this season?

What action steps can you take to support how you want to feel to achieve this small goal?

As you are moving through the season, it’s helpful to check in regularly and ask:

Have I been taking consistent action and using the action steps to ensure that I can feel how I want to feel once the new year arrives?

Am I getting enough balanced nutrition?

Am I hydrating?

It’s so easy to go into autopilot mode and become mindless and distracted and to just numb out when feeling triggered or stressed. This holiday season can be different! If you bring in some daily intention setting, connect with your feelings and experiences consistently, and practice some of the coping strategies below, you may have a different experience this year.

Here are some helpful ways to cope (even just slightly) more effectively this year:

Practice the 3-step cravings protocol - Pause, Reflect, Release: Use this anytime you are experiencing a food craving:

Pause: Take a deep breath, drink some water, relax your body, and create some space between you and the food craving.

Reflect: Use the BLAST technique, ask yourself, “Am I Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed or Sad, or Tired?” If you answer Yes to any of these emotions ask: What does this emotion need? To explore what the feeling you are experiencing is needing you can ask: What is the opposite feeling state? Here are some examples: Boredom needs Stimulation, Loneliness needs Connection, Anger needs Peace, Calm, and/or Kindness, Stress needs Relaxation, Peace and Calm, Sadness needs Uplifting, Tiredness needs Rest.

Release: If it’s truly an emotional craving, name the emotion and the opposite feeling state. Ask yourself, what would it take to get to that opposite feeling state? Practice being present with the feeling and see if you can receive the message of the emotion. You can use a coping skill such as journaling or talking it out to let it go. It can also be helpful to use self-affirming statements to help support the release, such as, “I am capable of handling my emotions,” “I am learning to listen to the messages from my body,” and “I can make a different choice.”

If you are experiencing a more general food craving and you find that you are truly hungry, eat it mindfully and listen to the cues from your body.
If you need additional support if it’s an emotional craving, you can try journaling through this decoding emotions practice:

Ask, what is the message from this emotion? What does it want you to know?

What does it need from you? Is there any action you can take?

Can you mindfully witness the emotion and let it be without needing to change it? Can you radically accept it as it is?

If the holidays are triggering because of others imposing their own thoughts and feelings about food, here are some ways you can practice setting boundaries with others:

Common irritating statements: “Should you be eating that?” “Are you sure you want seconds?” “Wow, that looks like a lot of food/sweets…”

Helpful Boundary Setting Statements for each of the above: “I understand you might not notice that it upsets me, but I don’t like it when you question my food choices.” “I prefer you not comment on my food choices.” “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t comment on my food choices.”

Sometimes during the holiday season you might find yourself with food guilt and shame, or criticizing your own choices. Here are some ways you can practice setting boundaries with yourself:

Common irritating internal statements: “I shouldn’t eat this.” “They are watching everything I’m eating.” “What’s wrong with me.”

Helpful Boundary Setting Statements for each of the above: “I deserve to eat what I am eating.” “I can only control myself and my choices.” “It’s normal to enjoy and indulge in food sometimes.”

One of the most useful ways to make it through the season is to have a plan for remaining present and mindful, to practice consistent self-care, to reflect and check in with yourself daily, and to have a plan of action. Having a plan is where you start; you can practice daily intention setting, daily decisions about your action steps that you will take to achieve your goals, reviewing the pause, reflect, release protocol, and journaling. Self-compassion is a huge part of remaining grounded and surviving the challenges of the holidays.

Practicing mindful eating, intuitive eating, and attuned eating can also support feeling connected to your body and discerning what is emotional and what is truly desired when it comes to food.

Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a nonjudgmental awareness.
Mindful eating is applying mindfulness to the process of eating.
Intuitive/Attuned eating is listening to your body and making choices based on your relationship with your body. Asking these questions can keep you more mindful and attuned to your body: What do I want? What am I hungry for? How hungry am I? How satisfied did this choice make me feel?

The last tip I will leave you with is to keep a Win-Log. This is a log of positive eating experiences daily, including allowing yourself to eat when you were hungry, finding the right food match for your craving, stopping eating when you felt satiated and satisfied, and being able to savor feeling good overall about your actions and choices.

Putting all of this together will allow more communication, acceptance, balance, and the ability to be more grounded and centered within your choices throughout this season.

When you can manage emotional food cravings more effectively, it creates a feeling of empowerment, deeper self-awareness, and more connection to your body so that you can begin to create a more peaceful relationship with your mind, your body, and food. Using tools to make a choice on how to manage your cravings builds self-compassion, self-trust, and self-empowerment. I hope you have a happy and healthy holiday season!

Nighttime eating is a major concern for many people who have a conflicted and difficult relationship with food. Nighttime eating typically indicates one of the following imbalances:

1. Nighttime eating may indicate that you are a chronic dieter. If you significantly restrict calories your body will crave nutrients and calories at the end of the day.

2. Nighttime eating may indicate that your blood sugar is out of balance. This will cause cravings at the end of the day.

3. Nighttime food cravings can indicate that you are an emotional eater. Unstructured time in the evening can trigger emotions and stress that cause uncontrollable emotional food cravings.

4. Nighttime eating may indicate that you are stuck in a deeply engrained habit pattern of eating at night that can be effectively changed with desire and effort.

If you struggle with nighttime food cravings and nighttime eating, it is most likely a combination of more than one of the above possible reasons.

Let’s begin by addressing nighttime eating problem number one. Restricting calories during the day and the chronic dieting mentality can cause intense food cravings. Here’s the thing, dieting is not a sustainable form of weight loss—in fact—studies show that chronic dieting causes weight gain! The weight loss industry has based their marketing on the premise that they can make you feel as though you do not know how or what to eat. The dieting industry makes you feel as though you are out of control and in need of someone or something else to be in charge of your food intake. While this may work temporarily (for weight loss, NOT necessarily for health), what happens when the diet is over? (Hint: usually a dangerous cycle of binge eating or overeating after an extended time of feeling deprived.)

If you have been significantly restricting your caloric intake, please know that it is simply not realistic long-term. If you find that you are hungry and unable to resist eating at night when you have restricted your food intake during the day, you are most likely having these strong cravings because you are indeed hungry! You also may be having these strong cravings because your body is trying to communicate to you that you are even malnourished. Your body is most likely craving energy and nourishment and your “self-control” reserves have been depleted and you find yourself eating and most likely in an out of control manner.

The most effective way to remedy this is to STOP DIETING! Start eating real, nutritious whole foods and begin to focus on healing your relationship with food through mindful and intuitive eating practices. Stop restricting and begin focusing on why you want a certain food and if that food serves your health and wellness goals. You can begin to add more nutrition to each meal during the day and notice if that helps reduce your cravings in the evening. Chronic dieting can contribute to blood sugar imbalances as well, which leads us to nighttime eating cause number two!

If your blood sugar is out of balance, it can cause strong food cravings at the end of the day. One cause for this imbalance can be when you start the day with a high amount of carbohydrates and sugars. This will spike your blood sugar early in the day and cause residual cravings all day long. The primary remedy for this is to add protein to your breakfast to help stabilize blood sugar throughout the day. Another way to manage blood sugar imbalance is to minimize taking in excess sugar, processed foods and certain carbohydrates (without being entirely or overly restrictive.) Balancing protein and fiber will help as well—vegetables that are loaded with fiber like leafy greens eaten with a healthy protein source can be very stabilizing and satiating.

Possible cause number three is emotional eating, which is often a major contributor to nighttime eating. Unstructured time in the evening can trigger many feelings. Some of the most common feelings that trigger nighttime eating are: stress, anxiety, boredom and loneliness. The most effective way to begin to manage emotional eating is to have a healthy, non-food-based outlet for your emotions. If you would like more guidance and support surrounding emotional food cravings you can check out my blog on the 5 stages of awareness here to guide you through becoming more emotionally aware. I also have several blogs dedicated to understanding and releasing emotional cravings and emotional awareness and food cravings, you can check out one here.

Emotional eating is complex and may be an area where you could benefit from support by working with a therapist. However, giving yourself an outlet will help to identify the feeling and then make a choice on how to respond to the feeling. Once you can recognize, name and understand the trigger for the emotion you are experiencing, you can create a new outlet for your emotions. Learning to be present with them rather than eating them away and numbing them out with food is essential. This part of the process is definitely not easy. Give yourself time to process your feelings through journaling, talking about them, and/or doing something creative to release them in order to have a place for them to be acknowledged, respected, understood and released.

Now onto scenario number four, nighttime eating as a long-standing habit. If you have had the habit of having a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine while unwinding in the evening or having dessert every night regardless of whether or not you are hungry, this can indeed be a difficult habit to break. Creating a new habit takes time, effort, discipline and consistency to make happen.

You can begin by identifying the habit you want to change and determine your WHY. Why do you want to change this habit? Make it something that is truly important to you and involves your personal values. It is helpful to remind yourself of your personal WHY continually to remain motivated to maintain this change. Determine what you’d like to do instead of your typical nighttime eating habit. Preplanning an alternative to eating in order to take away the challenge of having to force yourself in the moment will help you to change this habit. Maybe you’d like to have a cup of tea, journal, read, knit—whatever it is—set yourself up for success by having this new evening habit ready to access.

Commit to one month of changing this habit. At the end of the month, take time to reflect on how it goes. What has changed? How did this change impact you? How did it impact your health? How did it impact your self-esteem and your self-image? This is important stuff to notice! Not to sound like a broken record, but I will anyway—if you are truly hungry, allow yourself to eat—just ensure you are not mindlessly eating out of habit, boredom or otherwise.

Nighttime eating is pervasive and many of us struggle with this challenge and yet most people don’t share this struggle with others. Many people feel ashamed and maybe attempt to hide it. Awareness is the first step. If you feel you could benefit from support, reach out! Finding Freedom From Emotional Eating Online Course will help support you through challenges such as nighttime eating and emotional eating! You can learn more about this course here.

I hope these methods help to bring more awareness to the why behind any nighttime eating and that these steps will help you begin or continue your journey to make peace with food as well as with yourself.