Middle of the night eating

jmath0303
jmath0303 Posts: 71 Member
edited December 24 in Health and Weight Loss
I wake up every night with huge cravings for eating junk food. Sometimes I can eat an entire quart of ice cream or a half dozen cookies, etc. I never feel full but then wake up in the morning and feel like crap. I typically eat pretty good during the day with fruits and veggies, protein shakes, oatmeal, peanut butter, salads etc and typically eat the same each day at about 2500 calories. I'm a 26 year old 5 ft 9 male and usually run/ go on the elliptical for an hour and lift for 45 mins-hour a day. I weigh about 180 and want to get back down to 160-165. I just don't understand why I wake up nightly craving these junk foods. I try to stop myself from buying them but I always end up buying the stuff. I lost about 150 pounds and put on about 30 pounds the past year and half. It was so much easier before than it is now. Anyone have any suggestions?

Replies

  • hectortrejo1220
    hectortrejo1220 Posts: 3 Member
    I smoke herb which makes me usually crave alllll the junk foods, i have that "no means no" attitude during the day but at night its a different story! anywho i usually stop my cravings by 1. NOT buying the junk 2. DRINKING LOTS OF WATER throughout the day 3. before bed drink 1/2 cup of water mixed with 1 tsp of apple cider vinegar (with mom) on the cover, mix with 1tsp of lemon juice so it wont taste so bad.
  • psychod787
    psychod787 Posts: 4,099 Member
    Oh... for clarification... do you mean you never get full or just not on icecream and cookies?
  • Katmary71
    Katmary71 Posts: 7,152 Member
    Are you eating back any of your exercise calories? I didn't do this for awhile and work out and eat similar to you. I don't keep any trigger foods in the house but would end up eating a bunch of butternut squash, apples, and frozen berries in the afternoon and would have to skip dinner the nights after not eating back enough exercise calories the day after a hard workout. I added in some exercise calories and it made a huge difference in energy and workouts, plus the overeating stopped.

    Another thought is are you diabetic? I was put on too much medication at first and my blood sugar would crash in the middle of the night, I'd wake up starving. I kept bananas in the freezer and would eat one and go back to bed. I'm not on medication now but if I wake up hypoglycemic I'll eat something to get my blood sugar back up. Days I wake up with low blood sugar I'm usually really hungry and it stays that way for most of the day even though my first meal should make me full. Having high blood sugar can make you hungry too.
  • lgfrie
    lgfrie Posts: 1,449 Member
    edited March 2020
    I agree with most of what @psychod787 said. Not necessarily the part about the body fighting to regain weight, but perhaps if looked at through the lens of the mind fighting to get back to the ole' habits and fat-person behaviors it was once comfortable with.

    In any event, I recommend giving intermittent fasting a try. At least for a week or two to see how it goes. Try the easy version, 16:8, which boils down to no food after dinner, not one molecule, no milk in coffee, no artificial sweetener, nothing but water or black coffee/tea, and then when you get up the next morning, no food until something like 11 am or noon - basically, skip breakfast.

    The principle here is that you're currently fighting a losing battle in that while awake, you're getting food, and in the middle of the night, you wake up and your inhibitions are down and you just crave the good junky stuff. With IF, you'll be training yourself in the evenings, during normal waking hours when you're alert and able to exert self-control, to "do without" as a matter of habit and it could well carry over to the middle of the night. You will adjust to it, and your hunger signals may diminish such that you may find yourself either not hungry when you wake up at night, or you'll have learned to just ignore the hunger signals - a crucial skill that IF teaches and reinforces and that you currently don't have, or can't implement at night. My point being that logging hours during the day of disciplined food avoidance might give you a new level of control over your cravings and, very importantly, the self confidence that you can do this - you, not your stomach and urges, can make the rules, even in the middle of the night. IF has done precisely this for me and I was a brutal night-binger for decades. Obviously IF works for some and not others, so consider it experimental.

    It wouldn't hurt to get the high-trigger foods out of the house, too. However, in my experience that's only a partial solution. I had no problem hopping in the car at 3 a.m. to go to the 7-11 and buy 5,000 calories worth of ice cream, cookies, and chips. Only when I got into IF did I really crack down on that self-destructive behavior.
  • psychod787
    psychod787 Posts: 4,099 Member
    Creating a meal "pattern" may help. We dont always get hungry due physical reasons. Sometimes we get uses to eating at a certain time of day or night. This is evidenced in studies as well as anecdotally. I have noticed, at my work, that most of the people go to lunch at the same time. Now, we could have just had a meeting where food was eaten by many of them. Look at it like this. Pavlovian response is a real thing. The que for them is clock turning to noon. It then reminds then its time to eat. It can cause all the sensations of hunger. So, the clock is a "bell" in this scenario. For you, it could be the knowledge that you have these things in the house or, like my friend, its bedtime so oreos away!
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