If someone goes to bed hungry, what happens in the body overnight that causes them to wake up not hungry?
In: Biology
The body starts using its reserves to fill in the gap in nutrition – i.e. your insulin levels are low so the hormones in your body tell it to burn some of your fat. Less did makes your stomach retract too.
This is what people do for intermittent fasting.
This is a very personal thing. Personally I wake up hungry, not like crazy hungry but certainly ready to eat and then I eat breakfast every day, other people are fine with just coffee and nothing until lunch, other people intermittent fast until supper
And I’m sure I want to eat when I wake up since I always eat when I wake up, its a habit, if I didn’t eat my body would be throwing cravings since that’s what its used to
The only reason you feel hungry is due to hormones. When your insulin goes down while you sleep, the hormone leptin starts doing its job, suppressing hunger. Leptin comes from fat, the more fat you
have the more leptin you secrete and the less hungry you feel.
Ghrelin is the hunger hormone and its secreted in anticipation of food. As you fast ghrelin goes down because there’s no food coming in.
If I eat right before bed, I wake up feeling like I’m starving. Belly’s growling and hunger pangs. So weird. I just figured it was maybe because your body works so hard to digest the food in the night.
Here’s something related that I don’t think most people realize: if you’re hungry and you don’t eat, you don’t just keep getting hungrier and hungrier. You don’t even stay hungry. The hunger actually fades away all by itself.
I fasted for a week, once, and the hunger came and went in a multi hour cycle. Most of the time I did not feel particularly hungry. And at no point was the hunger worse than the hunger you feel if you skip a meal. That’s as bad as it gets. And if you can just wait that’s out, the hunger will subside for a few hours.
That said, there does seem to be a psychological component where despite not feeling all that physically hungry, you feel like something is wrong and that you should eat. Over time that’s the harder feeling to resist than the physical feeling of hunger.
Hunger seems to be much more a mental thing than a physical reaction to not having enough food.
Pretty much everyone has sufficient stored energy in fat reserves to power normal body activity for at least a few weeks. You’re not hungry because you’re critically low on energy, but because your brain is used to eating on schedule. Because it’s mental and not physical, exactly how it works varies widely among the population. Your brain is perfectly capable of deciding not to feel hungry when you wake up, despite being hungry the night before and not eating anything since then. It is all sub-conscious though. That’s why some people experience agonizing pain if they don’t eat on-time, while others might just forget to eat because they’re doing something interesting or decide to fast for a while just because they feel like it.
I was 328lbs I had severe depression and I was basically homeless so 1 tiny meal a day for about 4 months and nothing else basically starving myself sleeping hungry every night it just made me slim down to 200lbs (as of 2 days before writing this)
I do intermittent fasting 5/7 days a week, and I have to fight the morning hunger during the first 3 of 5 days. When I was doing it 7/7, it was hard the first 2-3 days, then easy peasy after that. But I ended up losing too much weight so switched it to 5/7 days.
How does one turn on that magic feature please?
Latest Answers