By Sandy Braz

After a long day, it’s tough to resist pairing your dinner with your favorite lineup of must-see TV, but new research suggests that you should rethink plopping down your dinner tray in front of the tube. Doing so may cause you to overeat.

According to the journal Appetite, 16 female volunteers ate lunch either while watching TV or without TV. When given cookies hours later, the women who ate lunch while watching TV ate significantly more cookies.

Why? According to the study, watching TV while eating could cause you to remember fewer details of what you ate and misjudge your hunger after a meal, sending you back to the kitchen for more. Add those unplanned meals up over time and you could see some unwanted weight gain.

Double booked for dinner and the next episode of The Bachelor? Write down what you eat at every meal in a food journal (like this one). This way, when you’re tempted to dig into the pantry for a post-meal snack, you can figure out if it’s your belly talking or just your memory playing tricks on you.