Why am I not hungry in the morning?
Hunger is like thirst. It is a biological sign meant to be honored. It is the body’s way of telling you "I need fuel SOON". Your cells need glucose (energy) as soon as possible.
Maybe you lost your appetite a long time ago. Maybe you thought this was a good thing and encouraged it. Maybe you never had a strong appetite. There's NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT to change to healthy habits. Since our bodies don’t run off of thin air, if we don’t give ourselves fuel, our bodies will make the fuel by other means.
And the other means looks like this:
When there is a lack of fuel your body breaks down muscle tissue, organs, and connective tissue using a stress hormone called cortisol.
Tissue breaks down into amino acids which your body then sends to the liver.
Your liver, under a lack of fuel, in return changes amino acids into sugar in a process called gluconeogenesis (This is a survival mechanism not a health hack!).
In this process you can still gain weight, even while you under-eat. Your muscle mass is broken down, turned into sugar, and stored as fuel (fat) because for all your body knows, you are in a state of survival.
This scenario puts your liver under immense stress, as it must make fuel because you did not eat, in addition to taking care of all the other daily functions a liver normally does.
There is a lot of appetite shaming going on in our twisted world. You see and hear it everywhere. The subconscious programming runs strong.
Family members asking, “Are you going to eat ALL of that”? Underweight influencers talking about how their appetite is slim to nonexistent and how it feels so great, as if it were a good thing. Or your friends casually telling you, “I never eat breakfast”, while kids and pets (who only know about the signals their bodies are sending) wake up crazy hungry, and nobody puts one and one together.
Somewhere along the road, not being hungry turned into a good thing...
And I used to think the same! But that is far from the truth. Most doctors and health coaches forget to teach these basic fundamentals.
Healthy people are HUNGRY, happy and horny.
And if we are not? Well, let me explain something kind of scary:
When cortisol (our stress) hormone is elevated over a long time it suppresses our appetite.
In the presence of long-term stress AND being stuck in fight, flight and freeze mode, our body stops asking for fuel and automatically starts making it.
When we stop honoring our body’s signals it tries to get through to us in other ways:
Irritability
Exhaustion
Anxiety
Hair loss
Sleeplessness
Low sex drive
Inability to digest fat and proteins
Constipation or diarrhea
Brain fog
Instead of going to the root of these emotions and symptoms to find out “Why am I not hungry in the morning" we:
Blame the meat we eat
Start cleanses and diets
Blame our genetics
Heal SIBO until the end of time (how many gut/parasite cleanses do you want to do?)
Blame the wifi router
Blame our trauma
You name it, we do it. Everything, except of course learning basic physiology.
We pay the most expensive coaches instead of watching what healthy people do, and doing what our grandparents did when they were young.
How to make yourself hungry?
A lot of these vicious cycles of stress / fight and flight can be broken simply by gaining your appetite back. This can be done by simply eating:
Eating enough
Eating frequently
Providing your body with the balanced fuel it has been asking for for so long
No hunger in the morning is not a good sign, and should not be catered to.
It’s something that we should be working on fixing. It’s the first thing to change on a healing journey.
Why is it so important to eat breakfast and be hungry upon waking?
When you have your last meal, let’s say 7pm and then go to bed, by the time you wake up at say 7am, at that point you have been fasting for 11 hours. Why would you not wake up hungry? You should be!
A healthy liver can hold enough storage glucose (glycogen) for about 8-10 hour until it starts to tap into other fuel as mentioned above, your tissues, cells, muscles. We don’t want that.
We want a fast metabolism inside each cell that burns away creating heat, and sending strong signals fueled by food, not your body breaking down muscle mass to make fuel.
Hello belly fat
Hello suppressed metabolism
Hello hormone issues
Hello poor blood sugar
So when you wake up not hungry, you can be pretty darn sure your body has been making its own fuel using cortisol for a couple hours. But remember, this is not normal! It's stressful.
If your cortisol levels in your DUTCH hormone test are low when tested first thing upon waking, it means your levels most likely spiked a couple hours before waking. In that time your liver ran out of fuel because it is compromised from long term improper fueling.
This is the precise reason why we pee all night long and wake up between 2-4 am. Which is exactly 7-9 hours after a 7pm dinner. You do NOT wake up because your liver is detoxing as many often assume, it’s because your liver ran out of fuel.
There are two ways you can go around this.
A. Have a snack before you go to bed.
B. Have a snack when you wake up in the middle of the night.
This needs to be done for quite a while and is not a shortcut. It can take up to 8 months for your liver to be fully fueled again. So be patient with yourself.
Here are some snack ideas:
A glass of raw milk / kefir with maples syrup
A serving of fruit or juice with soft-boiled eggs
A bit of leftovers from dinner (protein / carb combo)
Ice-cream
Berries with whipped cream and collagen or casein powder
Gelatin gummies
Cup of bone broth and a piece of starch (sourdough bread, potato, rice)
You don’t have to eat a lot, just a little, and don’t worry about your weight. Your weight will go down when your metabolism is healed and you have energy to exercise and build muscle and quite literally burn while you sit.
Regardless of what is going on, we should be eating within 30-60 min of waking to provide our body with fuel.
Eventually hunger comes back.
If yours has not yet, start with a small snack, and slowly increase.
We don’t want to be hangry, and we don’t want to binge eat. The goal is a natural, gentle oncoming hunger after you have gone a couple hours without eating.
Adrenalin and cortisol SUPPRESS appetite because digestion is not the priority when you are running from an active threat. In this situation, blood flows away from the digestive organs to deliver nutrients and oxygen to systems that are more important to survival.
The other side of this process to work on besides eating regular is to lower stress hormones. If you can reduce stress, hunger cues start returning and balancing out and sometimes our appetite can come back with a vengeance at first.
Which is totally OK and GOOD. Do not be ashamed of hunger or appetite.
It can be challenging at first, but after manually managing blood sugar for a few weeks, appetite often will begin to return as the liver is fueled and stress hormones are a little lower.
Ways to lower stress hormones:
Find support for daily life stressors. Find your balance, ask for help, hire help, get my tips.
Eat frequently and consistently.
Find the right macro-nutrient ratio that works for you (protein/carb/fat).
Eat bio-available protein, I cannot stress this enough for balanced hormones.
Replenish your body with minerals and fat-soluble vitamins, which are highly relaxing.
Vagus Nerve or Heart Rate Variability balance.
Woke up dizzy and nauseous in the morning?
For some reason this happens to a lot of folks and it's absolutely no fun!
Of course, nobody wants to eat when they are nauseous, but the irony is eating is the only thing that helps. You need to balance your blood sugar roller-coaster in order to get rid of nausea.
You do this with food. Not fasts, not medication, not detox.
There is no other way than using food, minerals and balancing the circadian rhythm with regularly timed meals that mimic the sunrise and sunset, sunlight and darkness cycle.
Nausea often happens when there are blood sugar issues and your liver hasn’t gotten the support it needs from you.
For example, when pregnant women get really hungry in the first trimester of pregnancy, it is because their blood volume is rapidly increasing leading to increased blood sugar drops because their need for minerals (specifically sodium) and bioavailable protein has increased. This leads directly to blood sugar drops.
Another reason for morning nausea is that your body is under high stress and may be waking up with high cortisol and accompanying nausea and lack of hunger. You are in a state of survival, not thriving. It’s a catabolic state where your body is making fuel by eating itself.
How to support waking up dizzy and nauseous in the morning?
Start balancing your blood sugar by eating within 30-60 minutes of waking and then eating protein, carbs, and fat every 3-4 hours!
Don’t expect it to go away over night! It can take a few weeks for your morning appetite to balance out.
Spend 5-10 minutes taking some deep belly breaths to get yourself out of that fight or flight state and into rest and digest mode (especially important for mouth breathers).
Have a little warm water or tea with some lemon/lime/orange, raw honey and a pinch of salt to get things moving.
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