Sleep Eating

A while back I went to a hypnotist to help me with an eating problem I had been dealing with for most of my adult life; night eating. I don’t mean eating after 8:00 pm while watching TV. I mean in the middle of the night, while I am sleeping. When I tell someone my stories of night eating, most people laugh, but to me they are a problem. I probably can consume 600 or more calories in one night. It’s always a big contributor to my weight issues.

Most of the time I don’t remember getting up, but in the morning when I wake up I often find clues in my bed to what I ate that night. Sometimes crumbs of cake or chocolate chips. Once I even woke up with pearls from my daughter’s jewelry hanging out of my mouth. That one could have been life threatening. I suppose that night I took a wrong turn and ended up in the wrong room. Anyway….I could go on and on with these stories.

Back to the hypnotist………after going through the process of being hypnotized the hypnotist reveals the reason I am eating at night, is a result of me feeling deprived of snack foods when I was a child. Here is what I must have remembered. My brother would take all the cookies or other snack foods shortly after my mother would go food shopping for the week. So there were not that many snacks for the rest of the week. So, the rest of my siblings (there were six of us) would not get very many snacks, because he ate most of them himself. He was mean about it too. He would just take fistfuls of cookies at a time. At least this is what was pulled from my subconscious while being hypnotized. I suppose this led to my eating at night, I probably wanted to consume food at night while no one was watching. I just felt like I needed to get my fair share and this was the only way I felt I could do it. It’s a form of food hoarding / sleep disorder. This of course is just her theory. 
I am not sure how much I believe that hypothesis, but one never knows. Here is a little tidbit of information I read from another blog that may lean towards this hypothesis being true.

http://www.blogher.com/how-your-past-can-lead-obesity
While we may not be able to recall the specific experiences or details of our childhood that played significant roles in influencing the adults we have become, there’s no denying that childhood is an incredibly impressionable time in our lives. Although people who experience psychological or physical trauma in their childhood’s often try to block them out of their consciousness as they mature, the truth is that the subconscious never forgets. In fact, traumatic childhood experiences often stay buried within our subconscious and influence our behavior long into adulthood. Further, our childhood fears and traumas can manifest as the desire to binge or make unhealthy dietary choices once we’re adults

Even though I didn’t feel traumatized while being a child, maybe for some deep reason, I felt a sense of being deprived. I am still not sure about all this, but one thing I can tell you, it’s a real problem. One I deal with all the time. I am working on this and it’s a difficult challenge considering I am more or less sleep eating. How do you face yourself while you are sleeping?