Skip the Snacks After 6 PM

Welcome to Walking the Walk, a feature that takes a deeper look at commonly shared diet and fitness advice. Every other week, I'll choose one piece of advice and practice it for seven days. Then I'll report back on what I discovered about making it work in real life and how it affected my own personal fitness -- and how it ultimately can affect your own efforts.

When it comes to late night snacking, the jury is still out on whether or not it helps with weight loss. As Maggie recently pointed out, many experts believe a calorie is just a calorie, no matter what time of day that you eat it.

Over at AOL Health, Bob Greene shares his seven habits of successful weight loss. One of Bob's best known tips, possibly because he shared it with Oprah, is to choose a closing time for your kitchen. In other words, put a stop to late-night snacking. His theory is that if you overdo at breakfast or lunch, you've got time to burn a few of those extra calories off. But if you overdo near bedtime ... well, you can't sleep it off, now can you?

I agree with the idea that a calorie is just a calorie. But as Bob suggests, and as Maggie also points out in this post, late-night snacks tend to be more of the chips and dip variety, eaten mindlessly in front of the TV, rather than a carrot or an apple. That's emotional eating, and getting a handle on emotional eating is one of Bob's seven tips for success.

Bob suggests setting your kitchen closing time for sometime after dinner, usually 7 PM. Since we eat an early dinner, I'll be closing my kitchen at 6 PM this week to cut back on late night snacks and see if this is a tip that really can affect weight loss. Fingers crossed.