Sugar and Sleep: Bad Bedfellows?

[JaneBerkin]

Hello! I'm sorry if this has been addressed before, but I looked throughout the forum and couldn't find anything. 

 

Usually I wake up several times in the night to pee, but always fall right back to sleep. I'm a pretty heavy sleeper in general. Last night I woke up at 2 AM and couldn't fall back to sleep for a couple hours. I tossed and turned, watched TV, eventually got really hungry and ate a mini meal. 

 

My meal 3 yesterday was totally non-templated and completely anomalous in my eating over the course of this Whole30 (my first, I'm on Day 16) which has been generally templated, and for the most part, no fruit. before whole30 I ate an apple and nuts almost every day as a mid afternoon snack.

 

However, it's summer, and I had a wicked craving for delicious seasonal juicy fruit all day, and last night for dinner just did it: had a gigantic fruit salad with nuts and coconut. I'm not saying that's right - duh. I know it's a terrible choice for a meal. I'm just wondering if having fruit late in day is generally disruptive to sleep? 

[ShannonM816]

It may be less that you had fruit late in the day and more that you had a whole bunch of fruit with no protein to help lessen the impact of all that sugar on your system.

 

Go back to eating template meals for a day or two and when your sleep improves, instead of having a whole bunch of fruit and nothing else, have a serving of fruit alongside a template-based meal and see what happens. 

 

It is summer, and it's pretty normal to want to eat more fruit now while it's in season, and that's absolutely fine. But you would probably be better served to have a serving or two of fruit every day with a meal than to have it all at once in one meal with nothing else.

[JaneBerkin]

It may be less that you had fruit late in the day and more that you had a whole bunch of fruit with no protein to help lessen the impact of all that sugar on your system.

 

Go back to eating template meals for a day or two and when your sleep improves, instead of having a whole bunch of fruit and nothing else, have a serving of fruit alongside a template-based meal and see what happens. 

 

It is summer, and it's pretty normal to want to eat more fruit now while it's in season, and that's absolutely fine. But you would probably be better served to have a serving or two of fruit every day with a meal than to have it all at once in one meal with nothing else.

 

 

ah yes, good advice - return to normal template, when sleep is normalized, have a piece of fruit along with regular protein/veg/fat meal to see what impact it has on quality of sleep. Self-Experimentation, of course, didn't even think of that. Thank You!