Food Hangover

Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m grumpy because I missed breakfast,” or ‘I’m in a bad mood because I’m starving?”

This is what is known as a food hangover. But the reason you feel grumpy or are in a bad mood because you missed a meal may surprise you. It’s not actually the hunger pangs or low-blood sugar that is causing you to feel bad.

“The food hangover is purely a cause of the crappy food you ate earlier.”

Hair Of The Dog

Hair of the dog is a phrase that means when you have had too much alcohol to drink and wake up with a headache, muscle ache and upset stomach. Having an alcoholic drink immediately makes you feel better.

That is the same way it works with crappy, unhealthy food. If you eat a high fat, white carbohydrate meal with lots of preservatives and artificial ingredients, a few hours later your body will start to feel bad.

You’ll be cranky, feel stressed maybe and probably tired too. This will prompt a craving for more of the same crap you ate earlier and before you know it you are scarfing down another crappy meal. You’ll feel good for awhile, but eventually start the whole ugly cycle again.

“When you have food and it makes your hangover go away, makes the headache go away, makes your mood get better and all that stuff. It’s not that the food is helping you do that. What that food is doing is making up for the crappy food you ate the night before or the morning of!”

The Food Hangover Fix

 If you want to avoid ever feeling edgy, nervous or bad because you missed breakfast or worked through lunch, then you need to clean up your diet.

Eating high carb, sugary, fatty fried foods creates cravings that your body will “feel bad” about when you don’t satisfy the cravings. High sugar foods prompt the brain to crave more sugar food and it will “punish” you with bad physical feelings if you don’t give it the “fix” it wants. Break that cycle.

Try this little experiment:

For 24 hours, overhaul your diet and eat only healthy foods. By healthy, I mean low in saturated fat, little or no sugar of any kind, no white flour or simple carbs (white rice, most breakfast cereals) no fried foods, and nothing with artificial colors or flavors.

Choose instead to eat mostly raw or steamed vegetables, a little bit of fruit, whole grain carbohydrates, very lean proteins (beans, fish, quinoa) and drink a lot of water for those 24 hours. Then skip a meal.

Most likely you will feel hunger pangs but not irritable, stressed, or shaky. Instead of “detoxing” from crappy food, you are simply getting a signal from your brain that you need to give your cells energy with food.

You Are What You Eat

If you eat a diet full of lots of sugar, highly processed foods, a lot of saturated fats and which is void of nutrition, then you will feel bad. It really is that simple.

Putting healthy, good food into your body will make it feel healthy and good.

Binging on fast food, cake or candy is just as bad for you as binging on alcohol.  It might feel good at the time, but eventually that stuff is going to have consequences – a ”hangover.” As long as you continue to consume in excess, you’ll keep experiencing these hangovers.