How Nighttime Snacking is Keeping you Fat

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Four-Step Weight-Loss Plan: Steps 1 and 2

When you're trying to lose a few pounds and make smarter choices, you'll succeed with a few guidelines in mind. Here are four steps to fight late-night eating:

1. Limit your choices. Consider the snacks you already eat and decide which ones are your favorites and which ones you could do without. Then add the winners to a list of "approved" snacks. Bonnie Taub-Dix, M.A., R.D., suggests you place no more than five items on the list. Once you write your list of five, commit to eating only those foods. You may become tired of the foods on your list, but because you can't eat anything else, some nights you'll forgo the snack completely. "The list works well because it eliminates variety," Taub-Dix says. "Variety often causes you to eat more." See our 20 snacks for 50 calories or less.

2. Control portions. Portion out your snack so you know how much you're eating. Those ubiquitous 100-calorie snack packs do this for you, but you need to do it yourself if you tend to grab from a large container. If you start eating straight from a box of wheat crackers, you may eat 20 or 25. But a serving consists of only six crackers, which contain 120 calories and 4 grams of fat. Your 20-cracker serving would be 400 calories and 13 grams of fat. And that's before you account for any beverages to wash it down. The make-a-fist guide to portion control.

Interesting study: Late-night snackers were more likely than daytime eaters to have interrupted sleep, much like sleep apnea, according to a 2008 study published in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.