Waking Up Hungry All The Time

Audio Transcript

Claire: Today’s question is from Claicy.

Claicy: My name is Claicy. I’m a 25-year-old female distance runner and I’ve been running competitively since middle school. My question is related to sleep and nutrition. I have this annoying tendency to wake up ravenous around 1 or 2am.

Most times I cannot fall back asleep without eating a snack. This happens despite feeling that I’ve eaten enough throughout the day and feeling full when I go to bed. I typically eat three meals a day plus two or three snacks, pre-run afternoon and bedtime.

My bedtime snack has been cereal and milk for a long time, although I’ve been experimenting with different snacks such as big sweet potato and a scoop of peanut instead.

I have been doing some research and learned that cereal can cause my blood sugar to spike and crush which would be to blame for the midnight awakenings and hunger pains.

I have been working with a nutritionist to include more healthy fats and increase the protein in my diet and make sure I’m eating enough to account for my activity level.

We’ve been focused on moving towards more initiative eating and listening to my body. I also find myself restless and having more difficulty sleeping well, the night after I’ve done a long run or a hard race, even when I run in the morning. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Claire: That is a great question Claicy. I have had some literal sleepless and hungry nights.

Let’s go over some of the simple explanations first and see if any of these apply to you.

The first, most likely possibility is that you simply aren’t eating enough. I know you said you were working with a nutritionist and that is great. I am not a nutritionist.

You should talk with your nutritionist about this issue and see if there are any tweaks that you can make. It sounds like you are working a little bit harder for the amount of calories that you are taking in.

I know that for a competitive distance runner, there is pressure to stay lean and trim.

To do that, you have to restrict calories. There is a very dangerous fine line there, and a lot of runners – more often women but certain men – will kind of push the boundaries on that line, just to get a little bit faster.

Being lean is an important part of being fast, but it is not everything. It’s a really dangerous game to play.

If you are not eating enough, all sorts of things could go wrong that could derail your training.Work with a nutritionist, and talk to her in detail, and make sure you are getting enough calories for the amount of activity that you’re doing.

You didn’t mention any performance decreases or any kind of weight loss. Those are certainly two obvious signs that you’re not eating enough and are potentially going into an over training state.

If neither of those things are happening, there could be some other explanations for it. You’ve talked about cereal before bed. Maybe that isn’t the best choice depending on what type of cereal. If it is the processed, white flour kind of cereal, that is mainly processed carbs and it is processed through your body very quickly.

You will get that spike and then the crush and you wake up in the middle of the night hungry. The sweet potato and nut butter is a better choice, but if that’s not working for you, something else might be going on.

Something to experiment with, that might be interesting, would be either UCAN or corn starch. If your issue is lowblood glucose level at night, you might need something that can sustain you the whole way through.

Let me share a little bit of history of that. There is a disease that some people have, called glycogen storage disease; very rare. That’s where the patients, who are mainly children, have to have a steady supply of carbohydrates, otherwise their blood glucose level will drop to dangerous levels in the middle of the night.

Parents have to wake up their children to feed them. They don’t get any sleep. The parents don’t get any sleep. It’s really rough going.

What they figured out in the 1980s was that if you take about 70 grams of raw corn starch, mix it with apple sauce or mix it with milk before bed, these children were able to sleep throughout the entire night without their blood glucose falling to super dangerous levels.

It wouldn’t work with all patients in the same way. With some, it lasted a little longer; maybe about four hours but it wouldn’t last the entire night.

Some scientists discovered, by a special process of what they do to corn starch, that they could make a modified a version of corn starch and they called it super starch. That kept the blood glucose levels steady throughout the night or up to eight hours.

That has turned into UCAN, which is a product out there for endurance athletes that many use during races to keep blood glucose levels stable.

You might want to experiment with that before bed. Try some UCAN or if you want to go the simple and cheap route, try a little corn starch mixed in. Don’t cook it. That totally changes it.

It would have to be raw corn starch. Some of that could be a solution if glucose, blood glucose levels are really the problem keeping you awake.
Another thing that could be a nutrition issue is magnesium. Magnesium is really important for runners, and not just runners but everybody.

Most people are deficient in magnesium. Our body does not make it on its own and we need to get it from food or supplements. If you have low levels of magnesium, it can cause the restlessness that you talked about and difficulty sleeping.

It can cause muscle cramps. You didn’t mention if you suffer from those while you are exercising. It will keep you from staying asleep. The other thing it does is it helps turn off adrenaline.

You talked about being really amped up after a hard workout or a race, even if it was in the morning. You sweat out magnesium. Athletes might need a little bit more than the general population.

There is a chance that you have a magnesium deficiency and that’s something that you’d want to discuss with your doctor and you can blood test for that.

The recommended daily allowance for magnesium is about 300 to 500 milligrams for women and about 400 to 450 milligrams for men. Research shows that athletes could benefit from more than the recommended daily allowance.

Some good sources of magnesium are seeds and greens, pumpkin seeds, kales, spinach, any other kinds of nuts. If you do wake up in the middle of the night, a good snack would be banana and cashews.

Cashews have magnesium and a little bit of protein. Bananas have starch to keep the blood glucose levels stable. That would be a good snack.

Another thing to do is to get magnesium through your skin. If you take a warm bath before you go to bed, add two cups of Epsom salt. Epsom salt is magnesium. Your skin will absorb some of the magnesium into your body that way and you also get the benefit of having a nice relaxing bath before bed. This helps your sore muscles and helps you sleep.

Obviously, watch your caffeine intake. Most racers use caffeine as a very legal and safe performance enhancing drug. It obviously can hurt your sleep so you need to be careful with that.

Figure out if you’re caffeine sensitive. Maybe you can’t have more than a cup or two in the morning. Look out for other sources like tea and chocolate.

Then the last thing that is more obvious is simply getting more sleep. Everybody needs to get a good night’s sleep to repair muscle damage and to grow your body. It helps you to be healthy, but athletes especially need seven to nine hours or maybe more.

There are so many benefits to sleep, recovery, and just feeling better; too many to even mention. One of the benefits of a good sleep is that it actually reduces your hunger.

First of all, you’re not awake to eat. That’s a good thing, if you’re trying to keep your eating under control, but it also has some benefits to help keep you satisfied.

Do all the things that you can to establish a good regular sleeping pattern. That means not trying to make up lost sleep on the weekends. Go to bed at the same time every night.

Make sleep an absolute priority. There is no better performance enhancing drug than good sleep. I know that your sleep is suffering because you’re waking up in the middle of the night to eat and we’ve got to get you through that rough spot.

Hopefully, some of these suggestions can help, but if none of the things that I’ve mentioned work, and you’ve talked to your nutritionist again, and you are eating enough calories, there are some sort of wacky things that could be happening with you that are more rare.

Those are some of things that you’d want to go to your doctor and get a blood test and make sure there is nothing else going on.

I hope that answers your question and thanks so much for sending it in.

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