Like clockwork, I always feel hungry in the mornings if I’ve had a heavy, late dinner the night before. It makes no sense. If I make a light soup and have that with some seed bread, I can comfortably make it to 12pm without thinking about food; if I have a bowl of lentil curry at 9pm, hunger hits before I’ve even got out of bed.

It takes a while to digest food, which is part of the reason why fasting protocols recommend you give your body a good 12 hours’ break every 24 hours. That means if you have your last mouthful at 8pm, you’d wait until at least 8am to have breakfast – a pretty standard practice. I try to have a 10-hour fast every day, but at the start of the week I ended up having dinner at about 10pm, so my stomach started growling before the first of my morning meetings. 

It turns out that there are four main reasons for that very real hunger pang. 

The most obvious cause of sudden hunger tends to be rollercoaster blood sugar levels. Nichola Ludlam-Raine tells Strong Women: “If your large dinner was rich in refined carbohydrates or sugars, it could cause a spike in blood sugar (glucose), followed by a rapid drop due to the natural production and role of insulin. This drop can stimulate hunger hormones such as ghrelin, making you feel hungry upon waking.”

Thinking back to that lentil dinner, although the curry itself was rich in protein and had been paired with a tomato, onion and coriander salad, I’d served it on a bed of white basmati rice. Perhaps swapping for wholegrain or brown rice might have calmed the spike.  

“The body’s metabolic rate slows down during sleep, which means digestion does too,” says Ludlam-Raine. That means potentially waking up while your gut is still processing and digesting. She says that that process (usually finished while you’re still asleep) can lead to feelings of emptiness or hunger.  

Of course, what we eat matters. If you enjoy a good pudding after dinner, then the chances are that you’ll experience a rapid blood sugar spike and drop – and that can lead to feelings of hunger the next morning. 

Your best bet is to eat meals balanced with protein, healthy fats and fibre to provide longer-lasting satiety and slow down that sugar release. That’s still possible if you’re a dessert fan; think about pairing yoghurt and berries with nut butter and dark chocolate.  

We’ve spoken before about the fact that eating late can disrupt your sleep. “We know that if you eat too late – after our biological night – we can’t digest the food so easily and it can sit in our bowel for longer, leading to more fermentation and issues like bloating,” consultant dietitian Sophie Medlin previously told Strong Women. 

“It can, of course, also affect our sleep because our body is unable to fully switch off while it has significant digestion to perform.”

Ludlam-Raine explains that good sleep is essential for balancing the hormones that dictate how hungry we feel. If we’re struck by a sudden burst of energy or can’t sleep due to digestion, we lose out on precious sleep – and that can impact our hunger levels later on. “A lack of sleep can increase ghrelin and decrease leptin [the satiety hormone],” she says, adding that acid reflux can also disrupt sleep.

The solution? If you’re having a heavy meal, you want to either eat it earlier or stay up a little longer to give your body a chance at digestion before lying prone for hours.

Images: Getty