Starving and binging

Sounds like you're putting your choice of what you eat and drink in the hands of your friends -- who may or may not care about their health. Make your own choices for yourself. Have a reasonable breakfast and lunch ("reasonable" is your own definition, but should include protein, carbs and some fat). Leave yourself some calories for dinner & drinks -- and you'll have a better chance of not coming home sick and bloated.

JustDoIt987 wrote: »

Hi , so basically during the day I kinda 'fast'. I only eat about 200 calories so that I could eat a lot at night. However , I end up eating all my calories at night and start to feel really bloated , full and just sick. Should I give up on fasting or am I doing something wrong ? BTW, the reason i do this is because I usually go out with friends at night and I never know what we will be eating / drinking , so I save up calories.

You're doing something wrong Eating until you're bloated and sick every night is a really terrible idea. Not eating (or eating very little) until dinner is fine (it's a type of intermittent fasting) as long as eating that way agrees with you. Clearly this isn't the case, and you would be better off eating more during the day and dialing back the calories in the evening. You can always take part of your meal home and eat it for lunch the next day. Maybe put a hard limit on the number of drinks, especially if drinking leads you to making bad choices around food.

Going out late every night is probably not great for your diet for starters, especially if alcohol is involved, but you probably know that already. If you're serious about getting lean and healthy, you shouldn't be "going out" all night more than once a week. Partying too much will absolutely ruin your weight loss efforts unfortunately, sorry to be a buzzkill. Going to bed too late, alcohol, eating crap....you're not going to be in good shape.

Fasting creates excess cortisol in most women, which is something you DON'T want when you're trying to get lean. Fasting as a means of weight loss works better for men, who don't have the delicate hormonal balance that us ladies need to maintain in order for our metabolisms to function optimally. Starving all day so you can "eat whatever you want" at night never works, you will never get lean that way. I just wrote a big thing about Intermittent Fasting and women, if I can find it I will come back and post it here. Your appetite is out of control at night because you've starved all day, so that's not a surprise. You really need to eat at regular intervals throughout the day to avoid imbalance. When you're starving, you're also going to have less willpower over the types of foods you eat, so it's never a good idea to let yourself get that hungry. You may also be using food as a way to deal with stress in your life, such as a way to unwind from a long day. Until you change your relationship with food, the urge to eat more at night is going to plague you.

What also happens when you stuff yourself sick at night and then try to go to bed: your digestive system never gets a chance to rest and your sleep quality suffers, so you get crappy sleep and wake up feeling tired. When you're deprived of quality sleep, the hormones that control appetite and regulate blood sugar get messed up so it becomes that much harder to control your eating later on the next day. Despite this, when you first wake up, you don't feel hungry like you should because your cortisol levels are through the roof and your poor sluggish digestive system is still trying to process the previous night's binge. High cortisol levels artificially suppress hunger in the early part of the day, but as you enter mid-afternoon to evening, they finally drop enough and you are HANGRY! Your leptin and insulin control is all out of whack from bad quality sleep and you're inhibitions are lower because you're TIRED, so you eat everything in sight, and thus the vicious cycle begins again.

So, don't eat a huge meal at night, especially right before bed, because you WILL impair the quality of your sleep, which will set off a hormonal cascade that leads to weight problems and is very bad for your health in general. I should also add that if you're pounding caffeine throughout the day to maintain energy levels, you're making the problem even worse and could end up in a state of adrenal fatigue.

The best thing to do to avoid late night cravings- GO TO BED! If you're sleeping, you can't eat! Sleep is GREAT for weight loss- in fact, if you don't get enough sleep you may not lose weight! Many times sleep is what your body really wants anyway- as you become tired and ready for bed, your brain sends signals that it's time to sleep. You start yawning, eyes feel a little heavy. But if you force yourself to stay awake so you can watch one more episode of Game of Thrones, now your brain is like, "okay, well if we are going to keep staying awake I'm going to need some fuel" and then, you feel "snacky". Also keep in mind that both dehydration AND sleepiness can FEEL like hunger. Ask yourself, "Am I really hungry? Could I eat an apple right now?" if the answer is no, then its FALSE hunger. You need to go to bed! Some of it is habitual too- we create rituals for ourselves, such as snacking while watching our favorite program at night, in which case, you may need to change your ritual.