Mindless midnight munching: a wake-up call and snacking for sleep
Crackers in bed: the worst-case scenario
Is this you? Beginning in your early 20s, you found yourself inexplicably gaining weight, sometimes ballooning to 260 pounds from your normal 140, your weight fluctuating wildly regardless of your attempts to control it with years of rigorous, disciplined, low-fat diet and regular exercise. You limited yourself to 1,200 calories a day, you worked out vigorously five days a week, and still your weight careened insanely, leaving you frustrated and bewildered.
If this sounds like a description of your struggle with weight, here’s a possible, albeit longshot, solution: Chain yourself to your bed.
The life described above actually belongs to Anna Ryan, a 42-year-old resident of Blue Springs, Missouri, and it remained a maddening mystery for her for 20 years, until the morning she woke up to find herself in bed with what looked like the remains of a food fight, and her kitchen a major shambles.
Her doctor referred her to a local sleep specialist, who immediately recognized the classic symptoms of SRED — Sleep Related Eating Disorder — which include a history of heavy sleeping, prior sleep walking episodes, and baffling weight fluctuations.
Video monitoring confirmed that Anna would periodically go on sleep-eating sprees, hitting the kitchen while as unconscious as a footstool and stuffing herself with cheese, chocolate, butter and so forth, tending to pass up the fruit and veggies in order to concentrate on the sugar-laden candies and confections — sometimes assaulting the kitchen as many as eight times a night and pounding down more than 2,000 calories.
Self-control is a challenge when the self is out cold
This might be just another mildly amusing human interest item if not for two aspects. First, sleep-eating is evidently a lot more common than is generally recognized. Anna may be a spectacularly extreme example and candidate for poster girl, but she is hardly alone.
Milder cases can go on undiagnosed for years if the somnolent munching is less frequent and less pronounced, especially in larger families where sudden absences of food are often routine. How many people grappling with excess weight may be undoing their own best efforts unknowingly and nocturnally is anybody’s guess.
Second, diagnosis is not cure. In Anna’s case, the obvious solutions ran afoul of her unconscious drive. Even if they cleared the pantry and refrigerator of all nonessential items, she would eat whatever was left, be it cooking oil or mustard. When they locked the bedroom door, she actually injured herself trying to break through it, to the point of blacking her eyes and knocking out a tooth.
She is now on medication that seems to be helping her to get through the nights unfed. For most sleep-eaters, their midnight snacking is more of an idiosyncrasy or inconvenience, but for the occasional Anna, it is, almost literally, a nightmare.
To prevent nighttime eating, consider . . . nighttime eating
Of course, most nighttime noshers are not driven by some unconscious compulsion, but are wide awake at the time, and are putting away the groceries during the wee hours because they can’t fall asleep and are bored, or wake up hungry.
When you consider that some 15 percent of us suffer from chronic insomnia, this becomes a fairly impressive amount of potential food consumed, in a land where weight-control problems don’t need any more help to proliferate.
Fortunately, students of nutrition and sleep have identified good and bad foods to eat an hour or two before retiring in order to facilitate slumber and limit midnight snacking.
On the Avoid list are large meals later in the evening and spicy foods in general. On the Enjoy list are oatmeal or cereal, granola, diary products (cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese), beans, nuts, bananas, eggs, avocado and high-carbohydrate foods in general.
As for the time-honored warm glass of milk, the Mayo Clinic says there’s no evidence that it hastens one to dreamland, but it is both a dairy product, and high in our drowsy-making friend tryptophan, so what the heck. And after all, what could it hurt? Sleep tight.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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