Ruth Field: How can I foil the late-night munchies?

Q Grit Doctor, I have been reading your book and it is really encouraging. I have been walking at a fast pace for 45 minutes a day and riding the bike a mile a day. I have lost about five or six pounds but have been stuck for about three weeks. Now, though, having eaten so much after 8pm all through Christmas I can't move for mince pies and wine. And I can never say No.

Do you have any suggestions to curb my appetite after 8pm and to get some grit? Thank you for your help.

A The only really effective way I've found to curb my appetite late at night is to make sure that I eat properly during the day. For me that translates into having a proper breakfast (rather than just grabbing a coffee); a decent lunch that includes protein; a small snack at the boys' teatime, about 5pm; then dinner at 8pm with my husband, and plenty of water throughout the day. If I stick roughly to that routine, I am never tempted back into the kitchen after dinner is finished. It falls apart if I have dinner too early (and am going to bed more than four hours after) and collapses royally if I skip breakfast – which somehow makes me less hungry for lunch – and then, come teatime or before, I'm at the sink stuffing my face with the kids' leftovers and then eating badly for the rest of the evening with my husband, quite literally until I get into bed.

The old adage “breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper” is most certainly one way forward in effective long-term weight management.

But don’t take the pauper part to extremes, especially when there are a lot of parties on. So what’s the solution?

Exercise. And you are already doing really well on this front. But you can do better. Your taking up regular exercise is probably the most important and effective tool you’ve got going on to manage appetite, control weight gain and lift you in every which way possible – in the long term. But it’s still early doors for you, and when you start exercising regularly you can find yourself spectacularly hungry, so you need to combine this newly acquired fantastic exercise habit with some sensible eating habits. I know from further correspondence with you that you work antisocial hours and nights, and that you are not eating breakfast, so this may well be part of the problem. Your body is going to want its share of daily bread and if you are starving it during the first part of the day, it is going to make up for it later (all those late night sugary snacks).

To recalibrate things:

1. Eat breakfast and drink shedloads of water throughout the day. 2. Try to stick to wholefood, brown carbohydrates (think brown rice, wholemeal bread, etc). A dinner incorporating brown rice never fails to keep me full till bedtime, and it is very fibrous, which means it stimulates your gut at the same time. Win-win. Plus, its delicious nutty taste will have you swapping it for white in no time. 3. Swapping white carbs for brown where possible is a very simple but effective crap-cutting weapon to have in your arsenal that will help with regulating insulin levels (brown carbs tend to release their sugars slowly) which helps guard against snack attacks later on.

My failsafe way for not gaining weight

? Adding in an extra run each week and making it a tough one (with a hill

, sprints or adding in an extra mile). With that extra run on board I find I can enjoy everything I fancy without fear of it impacting on my waistline. No one wanted to be dieting around Christmas but we all consumed a lot of extra calories, which have to go somewhere.

The time just after Christmas is the time of the year to ramp up your exercise quotient, not cut down on it, for it provides us with: 1. Vital extra endorphins for the happiness tank which the lack of sunlight depletes at a rate of knots over the winter. 2. An appetite control at a time when everybody’s liable to overeat because it regulates insulin – acting as nature’s own in-built crap-food deterrent.

The Grit Doctor says: Leave those calories at the top of the hill, not the bottom of your hips.

Ruth Field is the author of Run, Fat B!itch, Run and GetYour Sh!t Together. Her new book, Cut the Crap, will be published this month.