Archive for June 27th, 2009

You Think You Got It Bad with Calorie Consumption….

Wow, this is one of those stories where you thank the stars that you don’t have some obscure and bizarre disorder like this, because it can definitely mess with your attempts at maintaining health and your weight at a reasonable point throughout your life. Have you ever heard of “sleep eating”? Well, it’s a form of sleep walking, only people actually wake up and raid the referigerator and eat anything they want, but don’t actually have a conscious memory of doing so.

At least so they say they don’t! This is supposedly a real disorder though, and a real concern, especially since some patients with this problem can consume hundred or, like this woman, thousands, of calories without even consciously making the decision or enjoying. Jeesh, I hope she at least gets some enjoyment out of it, I know I’d want to! Can you imagine how many hours of exercise you’d have to do to counteract this level of calorie consumption? Many, many hours my friend!

There is actually a medically assigned name to the aforementioned sleep eating disorder, it’s called SRED, Sleep Related Eating Disorder, and it can cause people to pile on pounds at alarming rates because A, they are eating a lot of calories and then going straight back to bed, not burning anything off, and B, they are not consciously making good decisions about the foods they choose when they go on their midnight binges, nor are they restricting their calories, instead they are unleashing the worst eating habits without any consequence thoughts of their actions in eating the wrong foods.

The poor woman that I read about would eat anything in her fridge, even just butter, because she wasn’t even conscious of what she was eating, and piled on many pounds in just one month without knowing why – at least at first until she started putting the pieces of the puzzle together and realized she was raiding her cupboards and fridge at night – I mean, how could you not notice that after a while?

She said that she tried everything from putting locks on her cupboards and fridge and also taking medications so that she would sleep straight through and not go on her bizarre eating binges, but nothing worked and her health continued to suffer because of her nightly habit. She also tried reducing the amount of food that she keeps in her cupboard, but that did not work either. It seems this is a difficult thing to treat, seeing how only a tiny percent of the population suffers from it which probably doesn’t make it a high priority for a cure in the medical research arena.