So those are some things that you can be doing in the meantime so that you are still making progress in your food and weight struggles, that you can still make progress in losing weight the Catholic way. And knowing that a lot of the women are in, like I said, the fall reset, and some are brand new.

What I’d like to do is talk to you about a recent situation that I had with my food so that you can learn through it, and I want to do a little bit of teaching about middle of the night eating because I think a lot of women do find this to be a common occurrence, especially as we go through perimenopause and menopause as our hormones start to change.

So this may not be a problem for you, or it may have been a problem in the past, or it may be a situation that you may deal with in the future. So listen up, friends, because I actually fall into all of those categories. It used to be a problem for me, and then it’s not a problem, and then it popped back up.

So I wanna talk to you about middle of the night eating. I did a podcast on that, so I’ll put that link in the description as well. But if you find that you wake up in the middle of the night and you are hungry and you want to eat, there’s a couple ways that I handle that with the women that I work with.

The first level would be let’s just observe. If you aren’t making an easy to stick to meal plan and you want to work on this area, let’s just see what are you eating when you wake up. And if you are willing to record that, and to simply be honest and observant about that, then we can go from there. So that’s sort of like a level one.

But what I find also many women are willing to do is to simply plan. They know when they wake up in the middle of the night what they want to eat and what they feel peaceful about eating. So making an easy to stick to plan for that evening time.

In fact, I have a current client that I’m working with, and she said she’s waking up five nights a week typically. So we just say, “Well, if you wake up, what would you like to eat? What is the protocol?”

And what’s amazing is that once we created this protocol for her, and she felt so much permission and allowance to actually eat a snack, she was eating less. Because what was happening was she would wake up and she would think, “I shouldn’t be eating this.” And then she would feel that guilt and that shame, and then she would eat more.

So now she knows this is simply part of the plan. This is how I’m caring and supporting myself through this season of my life, through this one situation that I have. And I want you to see how calmly we address every situation. It is a situation, and we just choose how you want to handle it.

Will she be waking up and eating for the rest of her life? Probably not. But in this season of her life, with the things that are happening in her life, it’s a common occurrence. It makes a lot of sense. Okay? So we like to just plan for it.

You know, there is a lot of diet rules out there. There are probably a lot of health rules out there that would say, “Well, that’s probably not the best for her digestion. It’s probably not the best for her circadian rhythm. She’s teaching her body to be awake when it should be asleep,” yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.

But that’s just not her reality. And we can simply, instead of turning to the experts, say, “God, how do you see this situation? How do you view it?” And I’m pretty sure he’s not gonna wag his finger at her and say, “Well, she’s really messing up her circadian rhythm, and you know that’s really not great for her digestion.

And you know. On and on and on. I’m pretty sure the Lord would say, “This feels reasonable. If she can do this peacefully, she can have that conversation with him.” That’s how we work here at Weight Loss: The Catholic Way. When we do weight loss with the Holy Spirit, this is how we do it. We look at each situation in a really peaceful, ordered way, and we ask the Lord to inform us.

Okay, so that’s really how I counsel people, if you will, or give advice on nighttime eating. And I could obviously give more personal advice and suggestions if I heard about your situation. But now I wanna tell you about my history with nighttime eating.

So when I first came into food recovery, it was not a problem for me at all. I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and eat. It wasn’t a big deal. I would make my easy to stick to meal plan, and it was fine.

And then a couple years into my food recovery, I would find that I was waking up in the middle of the night, and I would have maybe some almond milk and, I don’t know, maybe some protein powder.

And I don’t recall all of the details about it, but I do recall that it seemed like it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, where I’d wake up in the middle of the night, feel hungry, get up and eat, and go back to bed.

Well, it wasn’t something that I felt good about, and I did two things at that point. I decided that I would make sure that I was very well-nourished throughout the day, and that I would eat a snack before I went to bed. And that way, if I woke up in the middle of the night, I knew it couldn’t be low blood sugar because I was well-nourished.

And so I made a protocol for myself that if I woke up in the middle of the night, I would simply lay in bed and pray, or if I got up, I could read a book or I could do anything, but I wouldn’t eat. I could do anything but eat because I knew I was well-nourished. And at that point, I would probably just be eating to, like, pass the time. Even if I felt hungry, I could honestly say I can go eight hours without eating.

And so that problem, if you will, took care of itself. Now, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I usually say a rosary. I really try to get my brain to quiet down, by saying a rosary and telling it, “Hey, we’re not thinking about those things. We’re thinking about the rosary.” And I can usually redirect quite frequently, and then I fall back asleep.

But last night was a very unique situation. This hasn’t happened for quite a while. In fact, yesterday was a very unique situation. So we are in a season of very full lives. There’s a lot going on here at Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit. When I am recording this, is actually the day that we are starting the fall reset.

So by the time you hear this, it’s gonna be a couple weeks after. But forget about the timing. But just know that as we are going out to find these women, that takes a lot of energy and creativity and thinking about, what does she need to hear? So my brain has been working on overdrive.

I’ve also been supporting one of our advanced groups called our Stay Program and developing new content for them as they cooperate with the Lord in becoming the version of them. So it’s lots of creativity. It’s lots of talking to the Lord. There’s just a lot of availability of me really needing to stay connected to God, connected to myself, taking very good care of myself.

And over the past weekend, I just had a lot of emotions. It’s really interesting. For a week during the month, my gynecologist, because I’m taking some sort of testosterone cream with estrogen in it, estradiol or something, she says, “I want you to take progesterone for seven days out of the month.” And so I do it at the beginning, and I take that progesterone.

Anyway, so I’ve been sleeping a lot. Progesterone makes me very sleepy and very emotional. All that to say, I can very much see why I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had a very busy brain. And yesterday, I had made an easy to stick to meal plan, but the truth is that I kind of loosely stuck to it towards the end of the evening.

So I got done working, and then I wanted to do some food prep for myself and my family, and I ended up having a smoothie. I had a pretty big meal, like a lunch at, like, 2:30-3 o’clock. I had a smoothie at, like, 6:00. And then I had another bit of dinner that I sat down, but it was a smaller plate, like, at 8:00.

So it just was very not my normal rhythm of eating. All that to say, I wake up in the middle of the night, I kind of toss and turn, I pray, and about 45 minutes goes by, and then I start to feel hungry. And I think, “Am I gonna get out of bed? Could this be low blood sugar?”

So I realize I am gonna get out of bed because I can’t sleep anyway, and I’m gonna go get some milk, and I’m gonna put some protein powder in it. And then I’m down there and I think, I’m gonna have some yogurt. You know what? I’m gonna have a full snack.

I’m gonna have some of my yogurt and put some protein powder in the yogurt and put some granola on that. I’m gonna get one of my rice cakes that I love and put some peanut butter on that. So it felt very balanced, a great like a middle of the night snack where I’m gonna get some nourishment, I feel good about it, it’s very enjoyable, very calm.

And I had it, and I wrote a podcast episode, which is so funny, not this one, but a different one. And I sat there, and then there was a point where I thought, “Well, it’s time to go back to bed,” and I ended up going back to bed. So I want you to hear those are the facts. That is absolutely what happened. And I want you to hear how I handled it.

So yes, it’s uncommon for me. It is totally out of the norm. I can probably look back and think, “Huh, this kind of makes sense why my sleep was interrupted.” Oh, and by the way, this was the first night that I wasn’t taking that progesterone that makes me sleep so well. So I thought, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s maybe it.”

So when I woke up this morning and I was going to make my Easy to Stick To meal plan, there was a little thought in my brain. A thought, remember, we’re not in charge of our first thought, but we can control our second thought, of thinking, “Oh my gosh, should I have breakfast? Because I just ate four, five hours ago. Maybe I shouldn’t have breakfast.”

And I thought, “Nope, Denise, your rule,” and yes, I really call it a rule, “is that you simply eat normally the next meal.” There’s absolutely no reason why I would change the food that I’m going to eat today simply because I ate in the middle of the night last night.

Now I know your brain is thinking, “Yeah, but you had calories in the middle of the night, so then you wouldn’t need those today.” Okay, that’s negligible. That is not important at all. That has nothing to do with the way that I’m eating today.

And I say it with so much conviction in my voice because I have lived the mental prison of that mental calculator. Should I eat it? Shouldn’t eat it. Should I? No, you shouldn’t eat. Am I allowed to eat? Do I have permission to eat it? I ate it in the middle of the night, so is it okay to still then eat my breakfast today? Shouldn’t I cut back a little bit today?

And I thought, what is the peaceful thing? What would the Lord say? And my rule is you simply eat normally at the next meal. And that’s what I want you to hear, you guys, because if you are starting this work or if you’ve been in this work for a long time, you are going to have moments when you overeat.

You are going to have moments when you wake up in the middle of the night and you eat when you didn’t plan on eating. You’re going to have moments when somebody baked something and you didn’t know it was going to be available, and you ate it, and you didn’t plan it. And you didn’t surrender it.

There are going to be so many hiccups, if you will, because you are human, and the hope is that you will have a very long life, and so there will be hiccups. There will be unexpected things. And what I encourage you to do is to make the next move not unexpected, that what you do at the next meal is to simply Eat normally. There’s no benefit to not eating normally.

What I have experienced personally and what I’ve seen happen with you guys over and over and over is when we have something unexpected happen or we overeat or we eat something we didn’t plan or we didn’t surrender it, we make that a huge problem. And when we make it a problem, we shame ourselves and criticize and judge ourselves.

And because that feels so horrible to be shamed and criticized and judged, we then simply say, “Well, I give up. I throw in the towel.” And we set off the cycle of binging or of overeating or of what I really hate is of abandoning ourselves.

And God is not in that cycle. God is not standing there criticizing you, shaming you, judging you. God is not suggesting that you restrict your food. God is also not saying, “Well, then you should just eat all the things.” All of that is not of God. And you know it’s not of God because it feels destructive, it feels despairing, it feels discouraging.

There’s no growth, there’s no harmony, there’s no peace. But your other option, to simply eat normally the next meal, is one of peace, is one of forgiveness and healing, is one of growth, of harmony. When you eat normally the next meal, you have interrupted the cycle and you have now restarted the healing. You have now instantaneously gotten back on track. And that is peaceful and ordered.

So what I really want you to hear is simply that statement. Make that a golden rule for you that you simply eat normally the next meal. Because the problem was never that I ate in the middle of the night. The problem would’ve been if I would’ve thought that was a problem and then started my restriction binge cycle.

So let’s all agree that because we are humans and we live in a human world, unexpected things will happen. We will do unexpected things. Some of them we’ll label as unexpected, some we will judge as bad or wish we hadn’t done that. And we never have to do it again. We can always choose differently the next time.

But at least for this time, we know it happened, and we can now choose to eat normally the next meal so that you’re instantaneously back on track. And finally, for your human brain that loves you so much and is always looking out for danger, it may want to say something like, ‘Oh, no, we’re back in that habit again.’Like I told you, I used to struggle with middle of the night eating. I don’t anymore. This was a one-time occurrence.

But if I do start to struggle with it again, or if it starts happening again, I don’t have to struggle with it, but if it starts to happen again, then I can address that, and I will learn how to care and support for myself in that instance.

So I’m not making something a problem before it’s really even a recurring situation. And then at that point, it’s simply a recurring situation that I can choose to keep the way it is, or I can choose to change it. So let’s just start using our language a little differently. Things happen, they’re situations. They’re not bad nor good. You get to choose how you view them.

And when a situation arises, we get to decide how we care and support ourselves through this. So I hope you see how different Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit is, how different Weight Loss the Catholic Way is, and that you simply take one nugget away from this podcast, and that is to eat normally at the next meal.

Okay. Remember, at Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit, we keep God our God. Not the scale, not our pant size, not the magic food. We keep God our God.

All right, everybody. Have a blessed day.