I Ate My Breakfast At Midnight For Years
I ate my breakfast in the middle of the night for years.
I didn’t talk about it. I was embarrassed by it. I knew it was strange and I knew it was wrong. But it was a part of my life.
It all started in college when I was running track and in the depths of my eating disorder. Despite having a large night snack I would wake up in the middle of the night starving from under fueling throughout the day. I would roll over, shut my eyes, and try to fall back asleep with my empty stomach. My mind would be racing trying to break down my hunger level to try and determine if I could endure it until breakfast or if it would keep me up the rest of the night. Eating out of schedule and not getting enough rest were both huge sins in my pursuit of athletic perfection. Usually my rest and recovery won that battle but my ED’s response was to think of the least amount of calories I could consume that would get me back to sleep. I was trying to minimize any extra calories I took in to not throw off the rest of my highly regimented eating schedule for the following day. My go to was usually an apple or a few bites of a protein bar. But some nights the hunger was so unbearable that my usual tricks couldn’t sustain me enough to overcome it.
Those were the nights that developed a new tactic- I would eat a full meal. Specifically, I would eat my breakfast, just several hours earlier than planned. My ED learned to love this because when I woke up I would be satiated enough to skip breakfast. It was like my metabolism never fully woke up without food in the morning which bought me a few hours before my body realized it was hungry and at that point it was almost time for lunch. My ED figured out a way to manipulate my body and hunger in order to consume the exact same amount of food in a day and sleep enough each night.
My body, which was desperate for calories, caught on that if it woke me up in the night I would feed it (unlike how I ignored it's hunger during the day). That was all it took for this to become a routine that lasted for years and occurred even on the rare days that I was eating enough. My mind and body thrive on habits and this became one of my hardest to break. I spent the last 2 years of college, while competing at the D1 level, eating my breakfast at 1am. It was a secret I kept from almost everyone because of the shame I felt surrounding it. The only people who had an idea were my teammates that lived with me and would wake up in the middle of the night from time to time to hear me in the kitchen.
Most people would question why I didn’t just eat breakfast again when I woke up, but those people probably have never had an ED. They have never experienced the irrational rules you are bound by and the anxiety that results from challenging any of them. The only thing I cared about was running well. In my mind adhering to these rules was a part of the process and my mid-night breakfast was just an annoyance I had to endure along the way. That’s how I justified it to myself.
How did I overcome it?
Time, Food, & Recovery
It took a long time to get to the point where I could sleep through the night without eating. Even when I was well into recovery and gaining weight and eating enough- my body would still wake up in the middle of the night and demand food before letting me go back to bed. It was a gradual progression. A few good nights followed by one bad which would trigger my habit and last for the rest of the week. But eventually the good nights outnumbered the bad and then overtook them all together. Every blue moon I will wake up in the night from true hunger which meant I did not eat enough that day. I get myself something to eat and go right back to sleep and then always start off the next morning with breakfast.
This was one of my most shameful and secretive struggles during my eating disorder and recovery and I wanted to share it in the hopes that it might help someone else who is silently struggling with the same thing. And if you are I encourage you to not walk the path that I did. Eat in the night and then eat again in the morning. Eat anytime your body is telling you it needs food. Ignoring those signs is only going to take away from your bodies ability to perform at its best.