Hi Everyone,
Are you always hungry and never feel full? Feeling constantly hungry can be confusing and frustrating, especially if your doctor is advising exercise and weight loss.
Maybe you’re exercising a lot and not losing weight. Maybe you’re eating low calorie foods that never fill you up. Or maybe you graze all day and just want to know why your appetite is never satisfied.
In this post, we will explore a huge factor contributing to excessive hunger, and I will tell you how to fix it!
Can’t Stop Eating All Day?
Why Do I Never Feel Full and Am Always Tired?
Diet Affects Sleep
How Sleep Affects Metabolism
How Can You Improve Your Sleep?
Can’t Stop Eating All Day
There are several reasons why you can’t stop eating all day:
- You are not eating or absorbing enough nutrients. Every day, your body needs a certain amount of protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. If you are not eating enough, or have digestive problems that affect nutrient absorption, you will still feel hungry. This is your body telling you that it needs more nutrients. Our food lists are designed to provide all the nutrients you need and our meal plans will help you feel satisfied and full.
- Emotional eating. Are you bored, stressed, or locked into unhealthy habits? I share tips on how to deal with Emotional Eating in the Masterclass Lives series.
- Eating too quickly. Take time to enjoy your meals. Sit at a table away from your desk or the sofa and switch off the TV. Listen to calming, relaxing music if you don’t like silence. Put your phone out of reach while you eat. And most importantly, chew each mouthful thoroughly as this helps your stomach to know when it is full.
- You are not getting quality sleep! This can easily make you feel hungry all the time. Let’s find out why sleep is so important for feeling full.
Why Do I Never Full and Always Feel Tired?
If you have had medical conditions ruled out by your doctor and you can’t stop eating and feel tired all the time, you are most likely not getting enough sleep.
Several things happen when you don’t get enough sleep:
- Your gut microbes can’t carry out their nightly “gut housekeeping” activities to maintain a healthy digestive system.
- Cortisol levels rise. This helps your body handle the stress caused by lack of sleep but it also disrupts blood sugar balance, digestion, and gut bacteria.
- Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which keeps lower body fat levels, is dysregulated.
- You produce more of the hunger hormone, ghrelin, and less of the fullness hormone, leptin. No matter what you eat you don’t feel full!
- You feel tired and less able to exercise so you have less energy expenditure. All those extra calories lead to more weight gain.
- You have less resistance to oxidative stress, which increases chronic inflammation.
How much sleep do I need?
Experts recommend between 7 and 9 hours of sleep for an adult.
There is a rare collection of people with a specific gene (1% of the population has DEC2) that can survive on 6 hours of sleep. But this is a very rare gene and the majority of adults need 7-9 hours of sleep to stay healthy.
Diet Affects Sleep
Firstly, lose the ‘diet’ mindset and embrace ‘nutrition’ instead.
These days, people have diets with a lot of processed carbohydrates, fats, and protein but are not getting the vitamins and minerals essential for health.
We can have bigger bodies but be starving on the inside – which will not help us sleep. If you have the right vitamins and minerals, you are full. When your body is satisfied nutritionally, you are more likely to sleep better.
Not having enough of the right nutrition could cause insomnia, which puts you in a spiral of sleep deprivation and undernourishment. This cycle makes your body more susceptible to chronic inflammation and disease.
How Sleep Affects Metabolism
Our bodies run on a circadian rhythm – an internal 24-hour clock. We have rhythms and patterns for sleep, movement, concentration, digestion, cell repair, brain function, and more!
When we live in harmony with these rhythms, we give ourselves the best chance of being healthy. But when we stay up late staring at screens, snacking on junk food, and not getting enough daily movement or daylight then we disrupt this rhythm and trigger health problems.
If you don’t give yourself the opportunity for 7-9 hours of sleep each night, you disrupt your internal body clock. Studies show that sleep deprivation leads to metabolic dysregulation. This presents as weight gain (usually around the belly), food cravings, poor blood sugar regulation, and inflammation. Chronic sleep deprivation is recognized as a significant contributor to the rise of type 2 diabetes – and it can be avoided.
EBS Members
Check out the article on Insomnia in the Personalized Advice section. Remember that on the 15th of every month, we bring you a new comprehensively researched article in the Personalized Advice section. Do get in touch if there is a specific condition you would like to see us cover.
How Can You Improve Your Sleep?
The first step is to look at your diet. The Eat Burn Sleep anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle is proven to optimize mental and physical health and promote sound, quality sleep.
This is what EBS member Jocelyn has to say about the program:
“I’ve suffered insomnia since February and I’ve tried everything under the sun, all the medications, acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and nothing worked until my friend introduced me to EBS. It’s been a bit less than 3 weeks and I’ll admit I have cheat days… and my sleep is back to 70%.
I see it as a silver lining as I had never heard of chronic inflammation before, so this 2 month’s insomnia experience has made me a lot more health-conscious and opened my eyes to so many things!”
Our food lists and meal plans ensure you never feel hungry and get all the nutrients you need. You will never be reaching for food all day long again!
And, our Movement Videos and Meditation Guides will help you move each day and relax properly, ready for a good night’s sleep.
Here are a couple of teaser dishes to get you inspired:
Savory Rosemary & Chives Paleo Bread Rolls
Slow Cooker Oxtail & Vegetables.
Want to know more? You can check out our membership options here and find more sleep talk in:
What Happens If You Don’t Sleep
Weight Loss & The Link to Sleep
I wish you excellent health and a great day,
Yalda x
Yalda Alaoui is a qualified Naturopathic Nutritionist (with a foundation in Biomedicine) who studied with the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London. She has spent over a decade performing groundbreaking research in chronic inflammation and gut health.
