Ăn gì buổi tối để giảm cân?

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Dear Dan,

Whenever I work the night shift (làm việc ca đêm), I wind up raiding the fridge (lại sờ đến tủ lạnh)—and ruining my diets one after the other. During the day, I manage to resist the temptation (chống lại cám dỗ), but at night, my self-control (tự kiềm chế) seems to stop working. What should I do?

—Meni

What you describe is a well-known phenomenon called "depletion" (sự làm suy yếu, sự làm kiệt sức; hết hơi, "hết pin"). All day long, we face small temptations (những cám dỗ nhỏ) and do our best to resist them. We maintain control over ourselves so as to be productive (năng suất), responsible people and stop ourselves from caving in to our urges to shop, procrastinate (trì hoãn), watch that latest cat video on YouTube and so forth. But our ability to resist urges is like a muscle (cơ): The more we use it, the more tired we become—until at night, it just becomes too weak to stop us. (This is one reason the temptation industry—bars, strip clubs (câu lạc bộ vũ nữ khỏa thân)—operates mostly at night.) One way to overcome this problem is based on the story of Odysseus and the sirens (mỹ nhân ngư). In this story Odysseus told his sailors to tie him to the mast as they sailed near the island of the sirens and not to untie the ropes under any circumstances so he couldn't be tempted to jump into the water and swim toward the sirens' seductive (quyến rũ) voices. The modern equivalent of this tactic? Keep all tempting things out of your house. You can hope that your future self will be able to resist temptation, buy the chocolate cake and eat just a sliver of it every other day. But the safer bet is not to keep chocolate cake in the fridge in the first place.