At midnight, do you tend to feel terribly hungry and you just go downstairs and raid the fridge and eat even more than you normally do during the day? We’ve all been there up in the middle of the night and decide you just have to eat something or get a glass of water or whatever. Having a grumbling stomach makes it difficult to fall back to sleep.
Being hungry in the night is a common problem and one that many of us deal with. Yes, even if we have managed to be strict and maintain a good and healthy diet during the day. Giving in to late night hunger cravings on a regular basis may result in weight gain, interrupted metabolism and improper digestion. Anything you eat in the middle of the night goes above and beyond your daily caloric needs.
There are a lot of reasons that you might be hungry during the night and a lot of reasons that it gets so hard to resist that leftover pizza and red velvet cupcake.
Changes in blood sugar
During the very early hours, around 4 in the morning, our body sugar drops as does our body temperature. Blood sugar levels should not rise and fall rapidly. Blood sugars should stay stable as much as possible.
Lack of food or Irregular Meal Patterns
If you eat at the wrong times and if you do not eat enough during the day, you might not have enough calories to sustain your body while you sleep. Eat at regular intervals around same time each day. Keeping blood sugar steady throughout the day helps prevent the late-night appetite.
Hormonal Changes
Hormones in your body control hunger. A hormone that makes you want to eat is called, Ghrelin and Leptin is the hormone that helps you limit your food intake. If your ghrelin and leptin levels become unbalanced, you may feel really hungry. One cause of these hormonal imbalances is stress. The hormonal fluctuations of a woman’s period can also cause hormonal changes that contribute to the desire to eat late at night.
Environment and Sensory Factors
Watching television late at night, seeing commercials of food make you feel hungry. Your lifestyle habits might contribute to midnight hunger. If you stay up until midnight but you had your dinner five to six hours ago, you might feel like snacking because it’s been so long since your last meal.
Here are some healthy suggestions the next time your tummy grumbles in the middle of the night:
Binge on fruits
You can never go wrong with fruit as a snack. You can have apples or bananas in the fruit bowl or you can just open a can of fruit. You can also have a can of mandarin oranges or mixing apricots and peaches together. Fruit usually has just the right amount of sweetness because it only contains natural sugar. This natural sugar tends to not cause people to get a sugar high, like they get from soda or chocolates, which allows them to fall back to sleep after their midnight dessert.
