The 2 AM Hungries

Stacivogue

Here's a question for the group: sometimes i have awful insomnia. on those nights, i get hungry. sometimes i cant get to sleep without eating something. I have trained myself not to give in unless i actually feel rumbles in my tummy. But on those nights when i really can't go back to sleep, or to sleep for the first time, if i eat a bar...does that count toward the new day or the day before? I used to add it to the day before but today i had one less bar through the day. Not sure if that will short circuit the weight loss, but i also think it's probably BS that people lose weight only during certain periods of the day. I mean, with such a low calorie diet, why the heck would it matter at what time you eat the bars?

mylyhud

I take 5mg of Ambien. Every. Single. Night.

GabyBaby916

I sometimes have sleep issues, but thank goodness (so far), I usually dont have the munchies to go along with it at 2am.
I would count the bar toward the new day (whatever calendar day you're in). Once the clock rolls past midnight, its a new day!

As for eating someting to get back to sleep, have you tried hot tea (camomille)?

PippaJo_

"Time" you eat doesn't really matter - *except* - the whole point in spacing your meals out evenly is so that your blood sugar/insulin response stays relatively even, which should alleviate most of your hunger. If you're eating one of your meals at 2am, then you're setting yourself up for longer gaps between meals, which means your blood sugar drops farther, which means you get hungrier between meals.

If you're eating at 2am (essentially beginning your eating day then), my guess is that you probably have a long evening without any fuel at all....dropping your blood sugar and probably helping you to wake up at 2am!


For myself, I space my meals at consistently regular intervals, and that alleviates most of my hunger. My day might be a little more 'compacted' than some, but it works for me. I've labeled my MFP diary meals with numbers, not names, so I eat #1 at 8am, then I eat again at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm, and 6pm. In theory. In practice, my husband isn't home until at least 6:45, so from my 3rd meal on, the times often get stretched a bit. It might look like 12:30, 2:30, 4:45, and 7 or 7:30, if I'm not super-hungry by then. And if I am, then I have a pickle spear while making dinner, or I start eating my salad while my protein is cooking.

That's a good schedule for me. Maybe for you, a better schedule might be 7am, 10am, 12:30pm, 3pm, 6pm, and a 'bedtime snack' at 8:30 or 9pm.

And I agree with the 'try some tea' suggestion, if you just can't tell your stomach to shut up at 2am! Maybe it's just that you've 'trained' yourself to take something in at that point, and some simple warm liquid might be enough to tell your stomach to chill out, already! :-)

dugrn

I used to work 3rd shift. When I need to get to sleep I would take melatonin. Worked pretty good for me. It's cheap and not a drug so worth a try.
When I wake up hungry now I just don't eat. While its true we have to listen to our bodies, sometimes our bodies have to listen to us.

bar403

My schedule looks like the one Pippa says on the bottom of her post

Stacivogue

It's not every night. But I take ambien and it makes me hungry. And it lowers my willpower. So I save a bar for right before bed. It's only every now and then that I wake up growly.