Building an Unbreakable Diet: Mastering Hunger, Willpower, and Nighttime Binging
An Evidence-based Guide
Do you know anyone who is crushing their diet? They’re a bit like a diet ninja—always eating the right amount of healthy food. Have you noticed if they struggle?
Here’s the truth. They probably struggle less than you’d think. Dieting gets easier. You discover tricks, build habits, and establish routines. Eventually, you hardly even think about it. It’s like getting up and going to work. You just do it. Your diet becomes bulletproof.
Now, if you’re not yet a diet ninja, then one or more of the following scenarios probably sounds pretty familiar.
Overeating at Night: You crush your diet at breakfast and lunch, but everything comes apart in the evening. Maybe not every evening, but far too many. Whether it’s a stressful day at work, a busy day with the kids, or the start of the weekend, you find yourself saying, "Enough of this" and reaching for a beer and a bag of chips.
Limited Willpower: Or maybe you diet like a pro for a few weeks or months, but eventually just burn out. You never know what to eat. You’re tired of the process and the struggle. And you just can’t keep it up. Your willpower is spent.
Overwhelming Hunger: Or do you start a new diet, and it goes really well for a couple of days. But then you get hungry. Like REALLY hungry. You struggle like a champ, but eventually give in to hunger and frustration.
If any or all of these scenarios describe familiar experiences, this article is for you. In it, we’ll take a deep dive into the three main reasons diets fail, and I’ll give you some evidence-based tools you can put into practice today, to end the struggle and bulletproof your diet.
Here are links to each section:
Willpower’s Limits: How to Avoid Diet Burnout
When it comes to dieting, we face a laughably unfair fight. On the one hand, your diet goals are promoted and defended by the executive center of your brain. The executive center is made up of the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. It’s what makes us uniquely human, bestowing us with reason, creativity, problem-solving abilities, impulse control, etc. It’s what makes you, you. It’s the source of your willpower. It’s your superpower, but it’s slow, conscious, and effortful.
On the other hand, your diet aspirations are continuously assaulted by the combined strength of your environment, habits, and reptilian brain. Your reptilian brain is evolutionarily the oldest portion of your brain and found at the base of your brain stem. It’s responsible for all the impulses and urges that you share with animals.
Now, around 40% of your behaviors are subconscious habits that you don’t directly control. They are effortless, automic, unconscious and often highly influenced by your reptilian brain. This is how you find yourself absentmindedly reaching for a cookie or uncorking a bottle of wine. No decision was made. Your executive function wasn’t consulted. It’s just routine.
To make a desperate situation worse, your habits and impulses are receiving succor from the environment. We live with a superabundance of cheap, delicious junk food and are surrounded by a culture that constantly promotes and endorses overeating. How powerful is the effect? Well, here are a few examples:
People who store junk food on their kitchen counters are often 30 pounds heavier than people who keep a clean countertop.
Your friend’s eating habits and body weight has a significant impact on your eating habits and body weight.
And on average, people eat 92% of the food on their plate. Consequently, when people have bigger portions, they eat 30% more.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that so many dieters fail to keep it all up. It’s a Herculean effort of will. Even when we manage to start strong, it’s hard to avoid burnout. Thankfully, there’s another way. Our enemy has a fundamental weakness, and we have a secret weapon perfectly designed to exploit it.
The enemy’s weakness: the environment and your reptilian brain are unconscious and indifferent. They aren’t out to get you. They’re more like dumb luck than a clever enemy. In another time and place, they could just as easily be your diet allies. Just imagine a world, where your reptilian brain (the source of your unconscious habits) was constantly leading you to diet success. A world where you were surrounded by nothing but fit people encouraging you to eat healthy food. A world free of junk food with nothing but reasonable portions of delicious healthy food.
How easy would dieting be then? You’d be like a movie star, supported by a fitness coach, nutritionist, and personal chef. Easy street.
The secret weapon: your executive brain may be short on willpower, but it is smart. Like, really smart. Consequently, you can simply engineer an environment that works for you. You can create habits and routines that work for you. You can MASSIVELY reduce the amount of willpower required to maintain your diet by outsmarting the problem. You can create a poor man’s version of the movie star entourage.
2 Ways to Bulletproof Your Diet Against Willpower Burnout
There are two ways to execute this.
First, you can shape your environment. You can build an environment and routine that works for you rather than against you. For each individual, the specifics will be unique, but here are 5 ways to lay a foundation and get you started today:
Do you keep food on your counter? Is it healthy or unhealthy? The foods you can see are more likely to be eaten than foods you cannot see, and having food visible increases your sense of hunger. In your kitchen, it should be more convenient to eat healthy than unhealthy.
What size plates and cutlery do you have? Research suggests that even nutrition experts will unwittingly eat 31% more when given a larger bowl and 14.5% more when given a larger spoon. These are nutrition experts. The psychological impact of larger plates, bowls, and cutlery is powerful.
What do you keep in your fridge and pantry? That is what you are going to eat. This goes for both healthy food and unhealthy food. A house with nothing but healthy food makes a healthy diet easy. A house with nothing but unhealthy food makes it impossible.
Do you have a healthy meal routine? Most people generally eat the same thing every day for breakfast, and lunch is typically one of just a few options. This is a huge opportunity. Automate a healthy, lower-calorie breakfast and lunch, and you’ll be 2/3rds of the way to diet dominance.
Do you have good grocery shopping habits? Grocery stores are designed to bypass your executive brain and cause impulsive purchases. And naturally enough, you do not impulsively buy healthy food. Luckily, with some practice, you can avoid impulsive purchases with three simple rules:
Do not shop hungry.
Make your shopping list in advance.
Do not buy food that is not on your list.
Second, you can use implementation intentions to begin changing your habits. Implementation intentions are a powerful tool for breaking bad habits or creating good habits. Instead of relying exclusively on impulse control, implementation intentions use your creativity, reason, and problem-solving superpowers to change your habits. This approach is regularly demonstrated to be successful in scientific studies. For instance,
In a weight loss study, women who used implementation intentions lost twice as much weight as the women who did not.
In another study, women were twice as likely to perform a self-administered breast exam if they used an implementation intention.
And in a third study, implementation intentions increased fruit and vegetable consumption among young adults.
Implementation intentions form an “if-then plan”. It takes the form of “if this or that happens; then I will do this or that”. The key is to use your problem-solving powers to change a habit.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s say you want to stop overeating dessert after dinner. The first step is to identify any potential challenges or opportunities. A challenge might be that your whole family will be eating dessert. An opportunity might be your love of fruit.
Your implementation intention then becomes, “If my family eats dessert after dinner, then I’ll eat a fruit plate instead.”
What happens if it doesn’t work?
If it doesn’t work, then you reformulate the implementation intention. You DON’T try harder next time. The goal is to circumvent your willpower by outsmarting the challenge. For example, you might notice that dishing up your family’s dessert before dishing up your fruit is a mistake, because the dessert looked so good. Consequently, you didn’t even bother with the fruit.
After reflecting on the problem, you decide to try plating the fruit before the desserts. You figure this will get you excited for the fruit and obligate you not to waste it before the dessert has a chance to work its malevolent magic.
You then continue this process of iterative improvement until you settle on a formula that works. Along the way, you might discover that you need to shop for more fruit more often just to keep stocked; you need to have a conversation with your spouse about the seriousness of your diet goals; and you really prefer berries and melons to other fruits. Notice that impulse control no longer determines success or failure. It has help. You’re iteratively putting more and more of the burden on your creative problem solving, reason, and creativity.
Now, you’ll still need impulse control—just far less of it. It’s how people create stunning and enduring fitness transformations. They change their environment. They change their habits. It’s slow and iterative. But it’s wildly effective.
If you want to take a deep dive into self-control and dieting, I highly recommend Menno Hensleman’s The Science of Self-Control. It’s phenomenal.
Hunger Pains: How to Build a High Satiety Diet
Uncontrolled hunger has destroyed more than its share of diets. Hunger makes everything more difficult, leading to “hangry” outbursts, plummeting self-control, and shoddy thinking. Now, if you’re trying to lose too much weight too fast, that can cause its own host of problems. But let’s assume you’re on a reasonable diet, which for most people means trying to lose around one pound of fat per week.
To lose weight, you need to create an energy deficit. You need to burn more calories (energy) than you consume. To lose one pound of fat per week, you need an energy deficit of around 550 calories per day. Many people assume that this deficit is the cause of hunger. It isn’t. Instead, hunger is primarily related to the size and weight of the food we eat. Eat a ton of food, in terms of volume and weight, and you will feel full. This is not just intuitively obvious; it's backed by science. As your stomach fills up, you become less hungry.
As obvious as this may sound, it leads to some very counterintuitive results. For instance, you can’t really tell you're starving, at least not initially, so long as you are eating normal-sized meals. In fact, researchers actually tested this. They fed people gels. Some people got to eat gels with a normal amount of energy, while others were fed gels with just 313 calories per day. The experiment lasted two days. They were basically being starved, but here’s the wild part: they had no idea. Although they experienced some additional hunger, participants couldn’t tell that they were on a diet. They were oblivious to the massive calorie deficit.
Now we don’t want to live on gels for the rest of our lives. And luckily, we don’t have to. We can manipulate our diet to lower the energy density of the food. In practice, this means we still might eat 4-5 pounds of food per day (like the average American), but nevertheless reduce our total energy intake, causing us to lose weight without going hungry.
Here’s how that works:
The energy density of food varies wildly, with some foods containing a ton of energy within a small space and other foods containing relatively little energy in the same space. I regularly use the example of strawberries and Hershey’s Kisses. A Hershey’s Kiss has 23 calories. A medium-sized strawberry has 4 calories. The strawberry is a bit bigger but contains far less energy. Thus, if one person eats five Hershey’s Kisses, another person can feast on 25 strawberries and still eat less energy. Thus, you can eat the same quantity of food, but far less energy. This is scientifically proven to reduce your appetite, helping you lose weight.
3 Ways to Bulletproof Your Diet Against Hunger
The goal then is to eat more food but less energy. There are three ways to do this:
1. Eat Less Junk Food: Junk foods are little energy bombs. In fact, a 2019 study found that cutting out junk food caused people to lose nearly a pound of fat per week due to a lack of hunger. They were still eating until they felt full, but their total energy intake was reduced by 500 calories per day. In practice, this means eating less white bread, candy, pastries, McDonald's, pizza, soda, etc.
2. Make Strategic Substitutions: Look through your diet, and switch out energy-dense foods for low-calorie options. Here are a few examples:
Switch cheddar cheese (402 kcal/100g) for feta cheese (262 kcal/100g).
Switch ground beef (30% fat) (332 kcal/100g) for top sirloin steak (255 kcal/100g).
Switch white rice (130 kcal/100g) for cauliflower rice (25 kcal/100g).
Switch pasta (130 kcal/100g) for shirataki noodles (15 kcal/100g).
Consider eating a mix of whole eggs and egg whites instead of regular eggs only.
3. Go Half Vegan: Not only are fruits and veggies low calorie and absurdly healthy, but they are also high in fiber which reduces your hunger. For your health and hunger management, I highly recommend going half vegan. In practice, this means filling roughly half of your plate with fruits and veggies. To really accelerate your fat loss, try some of these low-calorie options:
Veggies under 25kcal per 100 grams: pickles, cucumber, cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, turnip, spinach, summer squash, celery, radishes, cauliflower, swiss chard, pumpkin, arugula
Veggies under 50kcal per 100 grams: broccoli, collard greens, onions, mushrooms, okra, carrots, beet greens, kale, sweet bell peppers, fennel, leeks, eggplants, jalapenos, Brussel sprouts, artichokes
Fruit under 45 kcal per 100 grams: peaches, strawberries, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, blackberries, papaya, grapefruit
For a deeper dive into hunger management check out my article, 10 ways to manage your hunger for year-round visible abs.
Binging at Night: How to Prevent Overeating After Work
Dieting is stressful. Utilizing self-control is stressful. As discussed, it's a battle between your rational executive brain and your unconscious reptilian brain. And to make matters worse, research shows you don't even have to be on an effective diet to experience diet-related stress. Whether successful or not, both the effort of control and its failure result in stress. Essentially, you can endure stress and discomfort from a “diet” that doesn't lead to any actual weight loss—truly a frustrating scenario!
One common way to deal with stress, anxiety, or the pent-up tedium of a long day is through instant gratification. Seeking quick, pleasurable experiences can help alleviate negative emotions.
Do you see where we're going with this?
Food, especially junk food, feels good. It acts as a source of self-soothing by triggering a dopamine release. This dopamine rush can help balance out any negative emotions or tedium, making us feel better.
Is your brain “tired" from cramming for finals? Grab a Snickers.
Had a tough day at the office, capped by a challenging conversation with the boss? Pick up a pint of ice cream on your way home.
If your diet often collapses at night, this behavioral pattern is likely the culprit. Test it by paying attention to your emotions next time you're tempted to stray from your diet. What do you feel? Stress, boredom, anxiety? Are you seeking a reward after a hard day?
Now, there's one notable exception here. How lean are you? Are you able to eat enough calories to feel full? For many of my leaner clients (myself included), it helps to save some calories for the evening. In practice, this just means dinner is the biggest meal of our day. If you have abs, are already eating a high satiety diet, and experience physical hunger at night, this might be the first thing to try.
If on the other hand you self-soothe with food, here are three ways to regain control.
3 Ways to Bulletproof Your Diet Against Nighttime Overeating
1. Awareness Is a Superpower: Simply understanding these dynamics can offer a new perspective, leading to positive change. Viewing dieting as a challenge rather than an overwhelming threat can trigger an 'approach' response in your brain, releasing epinephrine, norepinephrine, and some cortisol. This response enhances performance and encourages proactive coping strategies, helping you quickly revert to baseline once the challenge is met.
You can use points 1 and 2 above to reduce the stress of the diet and reframe it as a challenge. Remember the implementation intentions? You can use them to attack the problem with creativity rather than hide from the challenge with dread. And if you push through the initial discomfort it will get easier. In fact, research shows that even with a significant energy deficit, after about ten days you begin to feel pretty normal.
2. Expand Your Self-Control: Believe it or not, you have more self-control than you think. Creating a gap between impulse and action can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths or waiting five minutes before indulging. This brief pause can be enough to break the cycle of impulse eating for some, empowering you to make healthier decisions over time.
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." – Viktor E. Frankl
3. Seek Healthier Dopamine Sources: Finding constructive ways to fulfill your need for instant gratification can balance negative emotions without compromising your diet. Elite performers excel not just in their discipline but also in their ability to relax and destress effectively. Here are a few alternatives to consider:
Listen to music
Engage in a favorite hobby
Watch a movie
Read a book
Dance
Enjoy a healthy treat, like fruit
Socialize
Spend quality time with family or in nature
Play a video game (with a set limit)
It's important to note that while phone use might feel gratifying in the moment, it often exacerbates anxiety and is best minimized.
These strategies, coupled with the previously mentioned implementation intentions, can help forge new habits for managing stress and avoiding nighttime binging. And if you’d like to take a deeper dive into junk food and self-soothing with food, check out these two articles:
Free yourself from junk food: a complete guide for adventure-lovers
4 Compelling Reasons to Ditch Junk Food for a Healthier, Leaner You
Final Thoughts
Dieting isn’t easy. Never before have humans lived in circumstances so thoroughly optimized to foster overeating. However, it’s also true that we have never before understood so much about nutrition and the psychology of dieting.
We are unlocking the diet code.
Researchers, coaches, and fitness enthusiasts are establishing evidence-based protocols that truly work. I’ve shared some of those here. So, although dieting is challenging, it's far from impossible. It can be done, and I hope you'll use a few of the tools in this article to take your diet to the next level.
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Thanks for reading!
