Danger zone

Journalling what I eat on Sparkpeople is still an educating experience.
After having been off plan over the holidays and the resulting seven-pound regain, I have re-started my food journal on the weekend, only to find myself massively over my daily calorie allotment for three days in a row.
The culprits were to be found in the daily intake breakdown they give you which shows, not only the daily totals, but also the calories in each food eaten in order of decreasing amount, so, the top item in that list is what gave you most calories on that day.
In this instance, it meant finding things on top of that list which I had, when ingesting them, not even intended to be a full meal, entering them under the category "snacks".
That single slice of gouda cheese I ate when coming home. Those two handfuls of mixed nuts that I just had to have after a long workday "just to tide me over till dinner". Those were, on two respective days, the top runners for the day, giving me some 20 per cent of my total intake. The problem being that, having counted these as "just a little nibble", I still ended up having a full dinner after eating them, none of the ingredients of which came even close to the impact of the preceding "snack".
Huh? I could have stayed within my limit if I had not had those caloric bombs as a snack?
Actually, it´s more a matter of convenience than anything else. I try, for reasons of frugality as well as time constraints, to do all of my grocery shopping on one day a week. Thus, I prefer to buy my veggies frozen so I won´t have them go bad before I can eat them. Frozen veggies, in turn, mean having to heat them up, and that means cooking. Which I do every evening for dinner.
The danger zone, for me, is the time between coming home from work and starting to cook dinner.
It´s about eight to nine hours since I had breakfast then, and even with a protein shake at the office thrown in, I´m usually ravenous on coming home. I´m also quite wired usually, having a job that brings a lot of stress.
Hunger+stress=the munchies. Simple as that. And that´s when I grab things that don´t need preparing and fill me up quickly. Things like cheese or nuts. Being hungry, I usually eat these fast, being stressed, I chomp them down without pausing to taste or feel what I´m eating. Which in turn leads to the subjective feeling of not having eaten much.
The food journal is a great tool for getting out of denial on that point.
Now I have to find a way to turn that realization into something useful.
The stress I´m in at work, I can´t change.
But I could avoid becoming ravenous if I were to have, not one but two protein shakes at the office, one of them at the end of the workday so I´m not as hungry when arriving at home.
And I could try to break the connection between coming home and eating, perhaps by exchanging those nuts and cheese for a cup of tea to sit down with.
I could also try to prepare dinner an hour earlier. DH has been grumbling about our eating dinner after eight PM anyway. But that´s what happens because we eat so much upon coming home that we are just not hungry any sooner.
I could also try to have something less caloric on hand to munch on until dinner´s ready. 
No matter how I do it, I have to stop stuffing myself with calorie-dense foods when coming home. If I don´t, I have no chance of continuing to condense myself.


Julia