Why not try to limit yourself to two real meals during your window and cut all snacks? Much simpler and easier to sustain.
Eat lunch at 12/1pm and dinner at 7pm. Only water/coffee/tea in between and after dinner.
Eat a good sized, well-rounded first meal at the start of your eating window, then muster all your willpower to not eat for at least 45-60 minutes afterward. That feeling of being sated takes some time, especially (IMO) after fasting and being so hungry. Give it time instead of continually eating.
Then, instead of snacking randomly, plan well-spaced snacks or small meals throughout your window. Say you break your fast at noon. Eat your lunch/breakfast, then have a plan for what you’ll eat at 1:00 or 1:30.
Ultimately, you need to be every bit as in control of your eating impulses within your window as you are when you’re fasting.
Nuts are really calorie dense.
Drink more fluid leading into eating window.
Sounds like you are getting protein…cool. careful with sugar/fructose, which can cause hunger spikes. Ensure you are getting fiber. If you are not, consider adding something like chia
Snacks like nuts and (dried) fruit are quite high calorie.You may want to try filling up with volume, like a salad instead of a sandwich, but keeping with the high protein.
As already said, you might need to just try exercising will power and drinking water. I find when I sink into work and keep distracted that helps best.
Good luck
No snacks. No snacks available. Nothing in the drawer to call out to you.
It is easy to eat 1000 calories of nuts and raisins without even realizing you did it.
To get back on the wagon you need to convince yourself what you’r doing and why you’re doing it. So make a meal plan again and have a measured planned lunch . Then, in the drawer where you used to keep those snacks, put a card with what you ate for lunch. When you want a snack, open that drawer and remind yourself what you had for lunch by reading the card and how it’s plenty until dinner time, and then have a beverage to top off your tank, which already has foodstuffs in it.
Spend a few weeks really clamped down. Relearn hunger and the harrowing race to the victory that is a nutritious dinner. Having your eating window being a grazing window puts you on a slipperier slope than you really want to be on.
Are you counting calories? Because when I do 18:6, which is on weekdays when I’m at work, I also feel like I’m stuffing my face because I’m eating the whole time. But if I actually count it out, I usually hit between 1200-1400 calories, which is pretty low. I try to get a lot of fiber and fat into breakfast, and mostly protein at lunch. My snacks are mostly fiber and protein.
Edit: 18:6
Best interventions based on your writing:
Stop the snacking and consider the calorie content of your meals. Make sure you get lots of fibers and proteins.
Drink yourself full on water.
16:8 alone does nothing on it’s own. It just makes diet compliance easier for some people
I know what you mean, and it doesn’t feel good at all. After breaking my fast I use to eat until it become hard to breath and it suck. What helped me is drinking plenty of water before eating, and it will get better.
Eat meals only, no snacks, or only scheduled, pre-planned, discrete snacks that are pre-portioned. Mindlessly gnawing nuts contributes to so many people’s weight gain without them knowing it because nuts are not filling.
Then, make sure the meals you consume have the right amount of calories and balance of macros so that your mind knows you are eating *enough* during your window. Don’t eat just because your stomach is telling you to. Have your mind tell your stomach that you are going to eat enough at lunch and dinner and that you don’t need those extra handfuls of food to sustain yourself.