Mark Bell offers a great solution for this, and it’s something he got from a bodybuilding coach whose name I’ll never recall.
At night: all the egg whites you want. Unlimited egg whites.
There is SO much going on with that statement.
1: You hear “unlimited/as much as you want” and it just lights up the reptile part of your brain that goes “FEAST!” And in your mind you think “f**k yeah, I’ll CRUSH some egg whites”
2: Upon actual execution, you find out that egg whites are pretty boring, and once you go in for them, you get pretty tired of them. And, in turn, now you get to ask yourself the real hard question: am I HUNGRY, or am I just bored? If I’m hungry: I’ll keep eating these goddamn egg whites, but if I’m not hungry…why am I eating?
3: Let’s say you ARE that hungry: great. You’re “overeating” PURE protein. What’s the worse that could happen? Oh darn: I recover better. Pair that with all the cool articles we’ve recently seen about how you CAN’T overeat protein, how the thermogenic nature of protein means you might actually burn MORE calories by eating so much of it, etc etc, and it’s really just a net win.
I’ll say that, in a world where I was trying to fuel myself ideally for sleepy time recovery, I’d rather have a slower digesting protein paired with some sort of fat before bed, but as far as “winning the battle of the bulge”, egg whites just plain rock.