The fix for 9 p.m. snacking is a planned 4 p.m. snack

Dinner rarely goes sideways at dinner. It usually starts a few hours earlier, when lunch is gone, work keeps going, and you begin eating whatever is nearest because making one clear choice feels harder than grabbing crackers while the pan heats up. That slide starts early.

So I would not try to get stricter at night. I would put one planned snack in the late afternoon, eat it before you open the pantry, and let that small move carry you into dinner without the usual drift into handfuls, nibbles, and ordering the fastest thing on your phone. Too late is the problem.

Keep the snack boring in the useful way. Pick one thing you can buy on Sunday, keep in the same place every time, and eat on four weekdays without negotiating, like a cup of yogurt and fruit, toast with peanut butter, cheese and crackers, or an apple with a handful of nuts. One repeatable option beats five ambitious ones.

The common miss is picking a snack that still acts like a project. If it needs chopping, blending, packing into little containers, or any kind of decision at 4:10, it will lose to email, traffic, one more errand, or the plain fact that you are already moving toward dinner with no margin left. Make it easy.

You also do not need to wait until you are starving. Eat it between lunch and dinner while you still feel normal, because the whole point is to make the evening quieter, not to prove you can white knuckle the gap and then act surprised when dinner starts with standing at the counter. One bridge helps.

Try this for four weekdays before you change anything else. If the evening is still a mess after that, fine, now you are looking at a dinner problem, but a lot of the time the cleaner move is earlier and smaller, which is a relief because buying one snack on Sunday is easier than bargaining with yourself at 9 p.m. Take it or leave it.

What I'd do:

1. On Sunday, pick 1 late afternoon snack you would actually eat on a workday, and buy 4 of it.
2. Eat it on 4 weekdays between 3:30 and 5, before you decide what dinner looks like.
3. If you miss 1 day, do not make up for it at night. Just eat it the next weekday and keep the test going.
4. Put those 4 snack checks into Pomelo on Sunday, then mark each 1 before dinner.