Seventy percent of people's weight gain occurs between leaving work or school and the next morning. Here are nine secrets to take control of this dangerous part of our day and lose weight.

Chaotic, uncontrolled, and often unplanned eating occurs during the late afternoon and evening for many individuals struggling to lose weight. The structure of the day, whether at work or at school with a planned breakfast, lunch and a snack gives way to chaos starting at four or five in the afternoon. Whether it's on the way home from work, when picking up children in car pool lanes or taking them to after school activities this is a dangerous, vulnerable time for many. It's common for people to eat foods that they never had dreamed they would be eating at the start of the day.

Whether caused by hunger, anxiety, hypoglycemia, or boredom, the whole day's attempt at weight loss can be ruined by the few hours of grazing and mindless eating between 4 PM and bedtime. (Hypoglycemia -low blood sugar- occurrs late in the afternoon and some degree may be normal, but skipping lunch, too small a lunch or the wrong lunch (lunch full of rapidly digested carbs) makes the situation worse.

Women making dinner will often eat as they cook, pick up their children's food or even eat the leftovers on the plate as they clean up after dinner. Men come home hungry and grab the first thing they see in the refrigerator.

Once dinner is over, homework is done and the children are put to sleep eating can even become more out of control. Almost all of this eating is out of habit, boredom, stress, depression or anxiety. Rarely is really due to hunger. Eating for these reasons may produce some temporary pleasure and calmness, but since the signal to eat was not hunger in the first place, often the feelings and the need for even more eating returns. People who eat too early and go to bed too late make this problem even worse for themselves. It leaves a lot of time to make some mindless mistakes. For other individuals it's about spousal "approval." When one spouse falls asleep before the other that leaves time to find the hidden cookies, cake or chips– after all no one is looking..

What can be done to get some control of the 4 PM to bedtime overeating?

The solution is about putting some structure into the eating during this period, just like you might have during the day:

Clean up the house. There can be no large bags of snacks or artons of ice cream because they lack easy portion control. Late in the evening there is little control and many people will eat whatever is there.

Limit the alcohol and carbs at dinner which makes control harder

Have a snack at 4-5 PM on the way home, this controls both hunger and hypoglycemia

Don't eat while you're cooking or cleaning up

Don't eat other people's food

Eating too early-going to sleep too late. Make sure you are not eating too early or going to bed too late. Since it does not matter what time you have dinner, push the dinner meal a little later. For example, if you are eating at 6 PM and going to bed at 11:30 that leaves a long time for mistakes. Have a snack at 4-5 PM and eat dinner at 7 or 7:30 and then plan to go to sleep at 10:30. This reduces the time for mistakes from five hours to three hours.

Go to sleep earlier. Most people have little control late in the evening and make some potentially very serious mistakes. If you are trying to do work on a computer late at night, your work is probably not very efficient. It's easy to compensate the work with some bad snacks. Go to bed earlier, get up an hour earlier in the morning. You will do better work and not be faced with same bad foods at six in the morning that you might experience at 11 PM.

Plan a pleasing late evening snack. The concept is a pleasing, planned and predictable treat in the mid evening. If you must snack in the evening, pick a definite time, maybe 10 PM for your small treat. If you know ahead of time there will be a snack a few hours after dinner, you can wait the hour or two. Looking forward to a mid-evening treat will help you reduce some of the evening grazing. Having no plan is far worse. It's all about imposing the same structure you have doing the day on the evening.

Empty wrappers in a paper plate: Put all of the empty wrappers from your snacks on a paper plate next to where you are sitting during the evening. The empty wrappers provide you feedback to show you how much you are snacking while you are reading, watching TV or working on a computer. For most people it's not hunger, but anxiety, boredom, stress, depression, habit that signals them to eat. Your signal to stop does not come from your full stomach, it comes from the brain where the signal to eat originated.

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Richard L. Lipman M.D., a board certified internist and endocrinologist has been treating weight and metabolic problems for 25 years in his Miami office. His recent book, The 100 Calorie Secret, describes how thousands of his patients lost weight and kept it off. Lean more weight loss and tips from a doctor who actually takes care of metabolic and obesity problems at http://www.the100caloriesecret.com.

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