Well, sleep eating is more or less what it
sounds, it's eating that happens at or around the time of sleep. There are various types of sleep eating problems
that can actually be quite disruptive for folks and are very much meriting a consultation
with a physician to figure out what's going on. Let me tell you about different sleep eating
problems that are out there. A type that I see is something that I see
in my practice is called night eating syndrome. And that's a syndrome where greater than 25
percent of eating occurs after the last meal of the day, after dinner. And in some cases of night eating syndrome,
eating can actually happen in the middle of the night. A person awakens in the middle of the night,
has a real urge to eat and feels that they can't actually even get back to bed unless
they're eating, something and sometimes those events can even turn into a binge type of
eating. For someone struggling with night eating syndrome,
that type of eating will happen quite regularly. So waking up in the middle of the night might
happen two or three times a week or even more.
That's something that's experienced consciously
by a person and often what's happening in that type of syndrome is the person is also
dieting or not eating very much in the earlier portion of the day, and part of the behavioral
strategy in trying to remedy or address some of that eating that's going on at night is
as simple as things like behavioral strategy of redistributing calories over the course
of a day so that eating is a little bit more stable.
There's a different type of sleep eating problem
that is actually a bit more like a sleep walking syndrome, or is associated with sleep walking,
where a person gets up in the middle of the night and actually completely unconsciously
or unaware that it's going on. They may walk into the kitchen and bump into
things along the way. They may even injure themselves, and then
again without being fully awake or alert at all may start eating various amounts of food. Even large amounts of food and the person
may not even know it's happening. They may not know on a given night that they've
done it. They may not know for several nights until
maybe they wake up on a given morning and then see food wrappers and other evidence
that it's going on. This can be a syndrome with medical ramification
because a person can be waking up repetitively in the middle of the night eating out of their
awareness, gaining weight, and not understanding the reasons why weight gain is occurring.
So in any case, if any of these types of problems
are going on consultation with some sort of mental health professional with experience
in eating problems or even in some cases especially the types of sleep eating problems that are
out of a person's awareness with a sleep specialist like a neurologist or another type of physician
that has experience conducting sleep studies can be a tremendous benefit in trying to get
to the bottom of what's going on with the sleep eating problem and beginning to address
it..
