Night time eating

[angelface1034]

Hey everyone! I am struggling hardcore with late night snacking!! I’m literally starving by the time I lay in bed and once I get up and get a snack...i wont stop eating. I feel super horrible about it in the morning and so disgusting 😭 any tips?? Does anyone experience this? The late night snacking is probably whats making me put on soooo much weight😭😭

[TheAwfulToad]

It would be more accurate to say you're snacking because you're overweight. And you're overweight because you're eating food that is inappropriate for humans. Start eating proper food and the problem will go away.

This will require a pretty radical change in eating habits. When your body is malfunctioning to this degree, there's little point fiddling about at the margins. You need to grit your teeth, throw away (or give away) all the things that are making you fat, and start again.

Things that make you fat (or more precisely, keep you fat when you are already fat) are:

- anything that contains a lot of sugar.

- anything that is entirely (or mostly) starch, such as bread, cakes, cookies, breakfast cereals, pasta, potatoes, and rice.

You need to be eating meat, vegetables, eggs and dairy. The amounts aren't really important, but you should always aim for lots of vegetables (not potatoes!). Cook for yourself. Anything in packets is bad news. Eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full.

Avoid anything that says "low fat" on it. You need to be eating natural ingredients, and natural ingredients have the correct amount of fat in them. Feel free to eat butter, cheese, and cream (not sweetened cream). You might initially binge on these if you've been restricting them, but you'll soon lose interest.

Just by way of example, a good breakfast might be two eggs scrambled with butter, a handful of salad on the side, coffee with cream, and a small bowl of Greek yoghurt. Dinner might be a grilled chicken portion with a selection of vegetables roasted in olive oil. To begin with, I suggest browsing through YouTube for a small selection of recipes that you think you can live with, and just eat those over and over. As time goes on you can introduce more variety, but if you don't have those 'standby' recipes on hand at the start, you'll be tempted to reach for snacks or ready meals.

Remember: eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. Never, ever attempt to eat less than you actually feel you need at mealtimes.

If you follow these instructions your appetite will quickly readjust and you will not feel hungry at bedtime. Incidentally, don't let anyone tell you this is just a "bad habit" that you can break by doing this or that. Your hunger is real. It happens because your body is not efficiently recycling bodyfat between meals, as it ordinarily would.

[Zendaya in reply to TheAwfulToad]

This is such good advice and I think it is really important to look at what drives our behaviour. Why do we wake up hungry then find we can't satiate our desires ? We are driven by our hormones and neurotransmitters. Unfortunately we ignore the impact of our diet on our behaviour and also ignore the impact of medications, prescribed for conditions such as high blood pressure or high 'bad cholesterol ' on our behaviours. My advice is ignore anything processed and more importantly ignore sucrose. This is a bit of a double edged sword as fructose is really bad for our health and fruit contains a lot of fructose. Yes it's most definitely not the same as eating sucrose as in fruit it is combined with fibre and doesn't enter the blood stream as quickly. However when we think about 5 a day make that green veg and prebiotics not fruit x

[Isinatra in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I lived by your lifestyle for decades now. Only one thing I would add, or bring more to point, I’m a grazer. Eat a little til I’m not hungry.If I waited for those three meals a day to eat, I would be so hungry, I would overeat and eat anything put in front of me. If you’re not starving to eat, you won’t overeat. Plus grazing is better for your blood sugar levels. Who wrote the rules you have to eat three times a day, anyroad?😊

[TheAwfulToad in reply to Isinatra]

It depends what you're grazing on. Certainly there's no "rule" that says we should eat three times a day (I've settled into a pattern of one-and-a-half) but as Concerned said, the fact that you can't go more than a couple of hours without feeling sluggish suggests an underlying metabolic problem. A healthy body can accurately maintain circulating blood glucose even during a prolonged fast (not something I'd recommend - just pointing out that it can be done!).

It's the sluggishness that's a warning sign here; hunger is an uncomplicated desire to eat, with relatively little urgency, whereas low blood sugar manifests as tiredness/weakness, feeling cranky, and a fairly urgent need for something sweet.

There is no way of knowing whether your blood sugar levels are fine without using a CGM. HbA1c is a very blunt yardstick - your body has all sorts of last-ditch efforts that it will try before dumping glucose into your blood cells, so by the time HbA1c is starting to creep up, the patient has been diabetic for years.

OTOH you may just have a small appetite. If you eat very small meals then perhaps it's not unsurprising you get hungry more quickly. But it does sound as if you've never really got yourself "fat adapted". The obvious way to tell is this: are you carrying a significant amount of bodyfat? If so, it's an indication that something somewhere is wrong.

[Isinatra in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I guess I didn’t explain myself well enough. I only get sluggish if I eat too many carbs at one time. Even healthy ones. Small amounts don’t bother me. I just spread out my intake of nutrients. It doesn’t fit for everyone, but it has worked for me. I just function better on several small meals a day. I do get full easily. Although I’m not carrying a significant amount of body weight, I would be interested in what fat adapted means. I’ve never heard the term before. Could I find something on it if I googled it or can you suggest some articles. Much appreciative of your time. ❤️🏄‍♀️

[TheAwfulToad in reply to Isinatra]

Ah, understand now. You're probably fine. It may be that you just have a small stomach

Getting sluggish after eating "healthy" carbs happens to most people, but for low-carbers it happens for different reasons. People who are overweight and prediabetic have a completely deranged insulin response, and their blood sugar is all over the place because their liver and fat cells are not reponding properly to the insulin downswing after meals. They cycle between the 'sugar hit' of a carb-filled meal and an unpleasant glucose dip that follows it.

When you switch to a diet that's generally low in carbs, your insulin response is re-tuned to suit. Although your blood sugar (and your general insulin response to food) will normalize, you will also be very sensitive to carbs; your body will respond to a carb-filled meal with a large insulin spike that will result in a slightly abnormal glucose uptake, causing an undershoot. This is not harmful. It's just that meals of that type are outside of the expected range of your body's adaptations.

In other words, a low-carber will experience a blood-sugar dip immediately after eating carbs as a result of a normal but rather suboptimal insulin response; someone with metabolic syndrome will experience a glucose dip a couple of hours after a meal as a result of (partial) failure of their "metabolic flywheel".

"Fat adapted" just means that your body is adept at using a combination of dietary fat, glycogen and bodyfat to provide a significant fraction of metabolic power demand (inluding large power demands like running), and can do so for long periods. There's a pretty good explanation here:

drinklmnt.com/blogs/health/...

[Isinatra in reply to TheAwfulToad]

I went ahead and got some info from healthline. I pretty much have been following the keto thing after all . Although the article mentions that complete studies haven’t been done on athletes or non athletes. It works for me, I feel good, and I can maintain a healthy weight. I started the lifestyle 45 years ago. It didn’t have a name back then . I think. Ketosis was a term used back then when everyone was starving themselves to stay thin and eating pretty much just protein. Ketosis was not a good thing. But that was then, and now is now. Science is wiser these days.

[PastelPink20]

Hello angelface1034!

For me, I notice if I don’t eat enough during the day, then I am starving at night. ...but my late-night cravings don’t make up for a small missed breakfast; they are more like breakfast, second breakfast, etc.

1. Make sure you eat nutritious filling foods throughout the day

2. Analyze your nighttime routine to find out the triggers that make one day worse in terms of snacking to another

3. Before bed, *plan* to eat one snack. Have it ready. Glass of milk with XYZ or fruit with yogurt or an apple and popcorn with nuts.

4. Replace bedtime routine trigger with another activity or thought or whatever.

5. Plan a 2nd snack... and limit yourself to that only. Make it something you don’t like that much but will eat a portion of. Like plain celery or with cream cheese and raisins. Takes away the sugar rush and appreciates the crunch but diminishes the appetite.

So, if I watch tv before bed... I like to do something while I’m watching tv. If I scroll on phone or play the switch and watch tv, then I don’t have free snacking hands. Sometimes it’s like boredom motivated.

The problem for me is that most of time it isn’t about being hungry. It’s like freedom or an obsession to fill my mouth and stuff my stomach with whatever I can. I become ravenous. Food will solve all my emotional problems (🙄😭). I have a small inner voice that cautions and warns that I will feel sick or nauseous - AND I IGNORE THE VOICE. So, it helps to plan a way to make make that voice louder and hold more power.

Choose a mantra like “food is power and I wield it with intention” or something

Promise yourself: I can only leave my bedroom after (12AM), if I do 5 push ups or sit ups or plank first. The idea is make that trip to the fridge less appetizing and alluring.

The habit of snacking is paved through repetitive behavior combined with an allowed thought pattern. AKA, eventually, your unconscious mind decides you need A SNACK before *you* think of it or agree to it.

So we gotta break that pattern sis.

Disclaimer: I have not tried all of these things and have succeeded over late snacking yet😭. I do have that apple by my bed - you already have a one-up on me by not keeping food in your room 😅😂. Feel free to not listen to me at all.

Empower yourself! Research or watch videos or find Pinterest aesthetically pleasing recipes. Create a mindset or small obsession of some health thing to overcome and replace this habit. The more your surround yourself with the kind of thinking and honestly marketing psychology, the more you can believe in yourself to:

- drink celery juice

- make kale smoothies

- or whatever you want :^)

You can do this!!! It is tough. It’s such a a weird sad thing to have a habit that you know is bad for you but you haven’t been able to stop yet. Congrats on reaching out on what you’re dealing with and looking for advice. (Coming out in the open can help against lack of accountability, shame, and secrecy). I wish you the best with your relationship to food and your body!!! 😊

[Subtle_badger in reply to PastelPink20]

I read through this and thought "that is not going to work", so I am not surprised that it hasn't worked for you yet. Read what @TheAwfulToad has written above.

But two things I want to suggest to you directly:

Don't exercise in the middle of the night. That will mess up your circadian rhythm and thus ruin your sleep. Disturbed sleep leads to elevated cortisol which in turn leads to all sorts of problems including - ironically - weight gain.

And don't keep an apple by your bed. That would be about the worse snack I could imagine. It's very high in sugar, so will raise your blood glucose and insulin, and you will crash later. It will also leave you going to sleep with your teeth bathed in sugar and acid, which is a recipe of tooth decay. If you want a snack at night, go for something high fat like cheese or at least clean your teeth afterwards - which may also disturb your sleep like exercise may do.

Good luck!

[BJ2020]

Had this in the past myself. Mainly it was bread or toast for me. 4, 6, 8 slices. Which mean that I was low on energy.

To stop this initially I skipped my normal breakfast time and combined it with lunch or around 11am and had breakfast and lunch together.

I then also noticed that if my stomach grumbles it doesn't mean more food it means more water as the grumbling is your stomach trying to digest the food you've had through the day (food takes around 36 hours to fully digest).

Alternatively you could have a banana before bed and some fruit or veg in the morning or stuff that is high in fibre.

Good luck and also don't be too hard on yourself we are all human and as long as you are making progress with yourself and learning along the way it's all good.

[Cooper27 Administrator]

"I’m literally starving by the time I lay in bed"

Are you eating enough during the day, if you feel so hungry come bedtime? This sounds like you're starving yourself and bingeing once you allow yourself to eat something.

[S11m]

It seems that you are a food (snack or carb) addict - the more you eat, the more you want.

Try eating nothing for a day - or a week.

Dr Jason Fung starts many of his diabetic patients on a (medically supervised) water fast for a week or two.

[Rosepetal60 Gluten Free]

Give yourself a cut off time to stop eating. Mine is 9pm at present time but I’m planning to get it to 8 pm. I like to have a container of Walnuts by my bed just in case I feel hungry . In my opinion, Walnuts are good. So at most , I’ll have 2 halves. But more often than not these days, I don’t have any at all at night. I find, when changing routines to loose weight, in order for it to work, it’s best done gradually with planning.

[Isinatra]

Hmmm. Interesting. I’ll seriously look into that. But I have more energy when I graze. Maybe if by adding a few more carbs to a three meal day, I wouldn’t get sluggish, or get famished by the next meal then overeat. If I was aware that it could cause problems by grazing, I wouldn’t do it. I don’t have any blood sugar problems. Good points to bring up. Thanks.👍🏼

[Isinatra]

A p.s. here. Maybe I’m not really a grazer. I eat about 4 times a day, which is probably equivalent to three meals. Hardly ever snack and never eat at night. I’m still pondering.☺️