How to Get Rid of Extreme Hunger at Night

For the longest time, I restricted the foods I love. This often caused me to binge on them at night. In today’s post, I’m sharing how I found food freedom by overcoming fear foods and eating those foods at the times I feared most.

Why Am I Constantly Thinking About Food?

Raise your hand if you don't allow yourself to eat the high-calorie, low-volume foods you crave because you're afraid you’ll "still be hungry" after...that's what I used to do! 🙋‍♀️ For the longest time, cookies were one of those foods. In fact, I would avoid any food that wasn’t high volume. I also tended save said foods for the nighttime. The result? Constant thoughts about all the foods I didn’t allow myself, but actually really wanted. This was all due to the fear that I'd still being hungry after, and thus go overboard on "junk food."

Come nighttime, when I finally "allowed" myself to eat the foods I had been dreaming about all day, I merely gave myself pseudo permission. Instead of eating real ice cream, I would eat two heaping bowls of protein fluff. Whereas I would top the heck out of these bowls with Oreos, Nutella, dates, and trail mix, I denied myself of any of these foods earlier in the day. The result? I thought about these foods 24/7, fantasizing about my nighttime feasts.

When I went through extreme hunger, these fantasies became tangible. I could no longer just think about eating the foods – it was as if a magnetic force had been created between my being and every high-calorie food item imaginable. I would delay my feast for as long as possible until suddenly, I'd be staring at an empty cookie box in utter shock, ruminating over how I'd "lost control" around food like that.

Throughout my recovery, I learned that bingeing on foods you restrict yourself of does NOT mean you are losing control. When your body craves a certain food and does not receive it, your body believes there is a food shortage (If you're interested in learning about the science behind extreme hunger and how to overcome it, grab a copy of my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger!) It's this perceived shortage that causes your body and brain to obsess over food, similar to how people binge-bought toilet paper during the pandemic!

Bingeing is a Response to Restriction

This "binge response" isn't unique to the 21st century. Just imagine a tribe of people thousands of years ago. Now imagine they're experiencing a famine. If there was suddenly an abundance of food falling from the sky, what do you think they would do? They would FEAST! They would eat as much food as they possibly could, celebrating the fact that this food was now readily available. Because what if that scarcity period came back? When you've deprived yourself of nutrients for a prolonged period of time, your body does not trust that food is readily available. So to ensure your survival, your instincts will cause you to binge, just to make sure you have enough reserves were the famine to return.

This is the same reason I found myself "overeating" the foods I restricted. My body had experienced a famine of these foods for so long that it needed to feast on them. What if the famine returned tomorrow? Just think of a bear that eats their body weight in food before hibernation. While we obviously don't hibernate for months on end like bears do, we do hibernate every night when we sleep – which is perhaps why my bingeing almost always happened at night. My body was preparing me for a period that I wasn’t going to eat – not to mention sleep being a time where the body repairs and regenerates itself – so my body was ensuring I was all stocked up!

How to Stop Binge Eating at Night

You’re probably wondering: how do I stop bingeing at night? I think you already know the answer to that: eat the foods you crave when you crave them. I’m not saying this is easy, trust me! I was in the vicious restrict-binge cycle myself for so long, which I explain in my book How to Beat Extreme Hunger. While my extreme hunger book teaches you everything you need to know about the science behind extreme hunger and provides a roadmap to full recovery, the TLDR version is that you can only free yourself from restriction by permitting yourself to eat unrestricted. The only way to break the binge-restrict cycle is by partnering with fear, by allowing it to guide you towards every next step.

In my eating disorder recovery, partnering with fear looked like eating sugary cereal first thing in the morning, along with entire batches of pancakes and drinking (yes, drinking) maple syrup. It meant eating multiple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (my favorite!) throughout the day, and then finishing off the peanut butter and jam jars with a spoon. It meant eating entire pints of ice cream, entire cakes, and entire packs of cookies during the day – every day, for a while. Even if I was so stuffed to the brim and felt like I was going to explode, it meant continuing to honor the mental hunger until the thought of eating more sounded worse than continuing to eat.

Did I fear I was developing binge eating disorder during my extreme hunger? Absolutely. Did I fear I was neurally rewiring my brain to become addicted to food? Yup. Did I fear I was using the term "mental hunger" as an excuse to "emotionally eat"? You bet. Yet it was doing the very things I feared most that allowed me to stop allowing fear to control my life.

The only way to overcome fear is by taking the actions you're afraid of. Of course it’s going to be uncomfortable, but it WILL get easier – I promise. If you want help on your journey to finding food freedom and being able to eat all the foods you crave while maintaining a healthy weight, be sure to enroll in my course Extremely Hungry to Completely Satisfied!