Do you wake up in the middle of the night starving? Does your hunger keep you from going back to sleep? Do you get up to get a little snack and end up raiding the refrigerator and the pantry? Do you keep snacks in your night stand next to the bed? Do you work 2nd or 3rd shift and struggle with deciding when you should eat?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, your risks for serious heart and liver disease, obesity, diabetes, and other inflammatory related diseases, have increased and will continue to increase over time, to as much as 3 times your normal risk. There are several factors that contribute to this extremely high risk increase.
Let me preface the explanation with a statement that “night eating syndrome” is a very real condition that affects many people. It is more than just bad eating habits and a lack of self-control. It is much more than that. There are physical, emotional, and psychological components to it, which I will explain later.
In order to fully explain why night eating syndrome has such a devastating effect on health, let’s explore what happens to your body. First, if you are staying up late and eating or waking up a few hours after you go to sleep, your body’s natural clock, your circadian rhythm is being disrupted. Your body goes through a very specific process of building, repairing, and cleansing itself every 24 hours. Your body is one giant machine that operates more like an assembly line than you may realize. Hormones are released in sequence and correspond to organ activities which also are in a specific sequence and at a particular time of day. The circadian rhythm is set by daylight and nightfall. By staying up late, artificial light disrupts the natural circadian rhythm. Some organs, like your liver, can only perform certain functions when you are asleep. Because it has to respond to other organs’ needs, if you are not asleep when it needs to take care of itself, then it misses out. This increases its toxic load and reduces its efficiency, which also effects other organs.
Second, by waking up repeatedly or by not being able to fall right back to sleep, your sleep cycle gets interrupted. There are 5 stages of sleep which progress throughout the night. The most important stage of sleep is REM sleep, which is stage 5. In each cycle of these 5 stages, REM sleep gets longer. Any interruption in sleep resets the cycle making it harder to get into the longest cycles of REM sleep. This affects brain cell health and cognitive functioning. It also results in higher cortisol levels, increasing the level of inflammation, which negatively affects every organ in your body. Over time this leads to weight gain, and leaves you vulnerable to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and premature aging, just to name a few.
So how does one overcome night eating syndrome? Let’s start with setting a healthy bedtime. Studies reveal that, due to naturally rising cortisol levels, going to bed after 10pm increases difficulty in falling asleep and staying asleep. If you have trouble unwinding in the evening, allow as much as one hour to turn off your brain and unwind. My newsletter “9 Tips for Better Sleep” covers ways to do just that. This will help set your circadian rhythm to its natural state.
Reset your digestion by turning off sugar burning and turning on fat burning. One of the reasons that you wake up in the middle of the night hungry is that your blood sugar is low. Your body is designed to burn fat while you sleep so that you can stay asleep 8-10 hours a night. However, a busy stressful life fueled by processed foods instead of a wholesome diet of organic meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts and seeds almost guarantees that your body is going to be burning sugar/carbs from the foods that you are eating instead of burning stored body fat. Therefore, a few hours after you have eaten, you are hungry again because your body has burned the food that you have eaten and doesn’t turn to your stored fat as fuel; instead, hormones are released to tell you that you are hungry. This can result in binge eating in the middle of the night. No amount of will power is going to keep this from happening night after night. To assist in turning off sugar burning and turn on fat burning, you need to get the processed foods, especially fast food and junk food, out of your diet, eat 3 regularly scheduled meals of real wholesome foods, and begin some form of light exercise. Avoid eating after 6pm if possible. Also, eliminate alcohol as it not only disrupts your sleep, it turns to sugar in your body.
While you are in the process of all this, take the junk food out of your house. That will help discourage binge eating. Place a bottle of water next to your bed. If you wake up hungry, drink as much water as you can to quiet the growling in your stomach and try to fall back to sleep. Set a minimum time that you will wait before giving in to eating so you have time to fall asleep first. Don’t get discouraged if you keep waking up. Soon you will discover that even though you woke up, you are not hungry. You will still have to overcome your habit of getting out of bed and eating, but it will get easier. Keep drinking your water.
During the daytime, analyze what your stresses are. Learning to identify them is the first step to releasing them. If you are having a hard time turning off your thoughts to go to sleep, or if you are waking up worrying about things, learning how to manage your stress can greatly increase the odds that you will fall asleep fast and stay asleep. If you are eating to calm yourself, or have guilt about over-eating, reducing your stress levels will help with this. Professional counselling may also be helpful; emotional eating may be the result of other unresolved personal issues, such as self-esteem or body image issues.
If you are staying up late and continue to eat after the evening meal, you are still night eating; it still disrupts your circadian rhythm and increases your risk of serious health problems.
Eating disorders such as bulimia, anoxeria nervosa, binge eating disorder, and nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder all serious eating disorders that are different than night eating syndrome and need to be addressed by a professional trained in these disorders.
For those people who have to work 2nd or 3rd shift, there are a few things that can help reduce your risk of developing a serious disease, such as heart or kidney disease. To mitigate the dangers of fatigue, it is best to restructure your activities to mimic the activities of people working during the daytime. That means planning to get your 8 hours of sleep before you go to work, and staying awake for several hours after you get off of work. Studies show that people are more alert and productive when they sleep right before going to work. In order to get good quality sleep, your bedroom needs to be as dark as possible. Avoid television and other electronic devices for at least one hour before going to bed. Remove as many electronic devices from your room as possible to reduce the amount of EMF in your room.
Schedule mealtimes as you normally would with breakfast upon waking for work, have your lunch in the middle of your shift, and your dinner approximately 3 hours before you go to bed. It will take time, but your circadian rhythm will change to your schedule. The catch is that your must uphold this routine even on the weekends and your time off. For people with kids or other family this may not be possible.
Even if you are able to completely restructure your schedule as suggested above, your risk for serious health problems is still greater than if you worked 1st shift and slept through the night. If you are unable to switch to a daytime job, you will just have to decide what works best for you. If you do switch to a daytime shift, it may take a long time for your body to completely adjust its circadian rhythm back to normal but your health is well worth it.
References
Allison, K. C., Stunkard, A. J., & Thier, S. (2004). Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Center, R. U. (2014, May 21). ScienceDaily. Retrieved from Disruption of Circadian Rhythms May Contribute to Inflammatory Disease: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140521175920
Douillard, J. D. (2013, September 24). Nightshift Survival. Retrieved from Lifespa.com: www.lifespa.com/night-shift-workers-suffer-health-risks/
Long-Term Study Links Chronic Insomnia to Increased Risk of Death. (2010, June 24). Retrieved from Mercola.com: articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/06/24/longterm-study-links-chronic-insomnia-to-increased-risk-of-death.aspx
Mercola, J. D. (2011, December 21). Health Articles. Retrieved from Mercola.com: articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/21/night-shift-work-may-raise-diabetes-risk.aspx
Mercola, J. D. (2014, July 24). Study: Interrupted Sleep May Be as Harmful as No Sleep at All. Retrieved from Mercola.com: articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/07/24/interrupted-sleep.aspx
Prostate Cancer Risks Rise With Shift Work. (2006, October 07). Retrieved from Mercola.com: articles.mecola.com/sites/articles/archive/2006/10/07/prostate-cancer-risks-rise-with-shift-work.aspx
Toronto, U. o. (2008, April 11). ScienceDaily. Retrieved from Shift Work Linked To Organ Disease: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409205727
