Getting up earlier by not eating late: anecdotal bodyhacking | Hacker News Reader

Getting up earlier by not eating late: anecdotal bodyhacking

trendpreneur.com

104 pointsjlees37 comments

Try having kids you young whippersnappers. You won't have any problem waking up when your 1 and 3 year old are awake at 5-7am looking for breakfast. You also won't have any problem sleeping as I practically pass out every night once the last one is tucked in for the night.

Problems waking you up isn't a good solution to having a problem waking up.

I had to read that about 5 times. As a father of 2... I agree completely :)

We call them our children, not 'problems'. And they provide us the reason FOR getting up in the morning.

/this is an old dead thread which I shouldn't be replying to

Depends on the kids! My brother (2 years older) is a night owl, and I'm not. When we were young, we'd tag-team our parents around the clock so they hardly slept at all.

Unfortunately I was too young to remember it. Ah, good times, though.

I have a 2 year old. I go to sleep around midnight, wake up via alarm at 6:30, and can't work late that well anyway.

I have a six week old and now I can begin to relate. I used to have trouble waking up by 9am. Now I'm up for good at 6am. Friends had told me that in the first month they were getting about four hours of sleep a night. What they didn't tell me (and what I discovered the hard way) was that those four hours were really four discontiguous one-hour periods. Last night my child slept for 6 hours straight. Six hours! I got five hours contiguous out of that, and wow, I felt like a brand new person. I never thought I'd be estatic to get so little sleep.

Interesting how physical activity is not showing up in any of these so called experiments. Why is this trend to outsmart the body? Give it a bit of work and you'll have a balance and energy that no wii fit and alarm clock can asses. No gadget nor habit can outperform a few push-ups with an intense workout or an energetic soccer game. Your body will tell you when it's time to sleep and when it's time to eat and believe me it will correlate with your working day.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

I’ve had a problem getting up early for as long as I can remember.

Physical work does not work for me. What finally did the trick was sunlight. I moved (a year ago) to a new place which has panorama windows in all the rooms and facing ocean/sky — since then my sleeping schedule has been normal except December/January (I’m in Scandinavia, so we have dark winters).

For scientific explanation see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin

First, the article never explicitly states that the author didn't try exercise.

Second, getting up and exercising is a complementary behavior to changing your eating habits. Neither negates the other and both together are best.

With luck, the author will feel more energetic after the diet change, and will then be motivated to start an exercise program. (or just nail the early donut, shrugs)

I do exercise, but not as much as I'd like to. Half the trouble is finding time in a busy day when I still think of myself as horribly unfit (I recently lost 70 pounds and am a lot fitter than I used to be!).

One of the first things I tried to get my body clock sorted out was morning gym sessions, but I just couldn't afford the time or subscription cost.

Try morning jogs outside. Start slow. It does wonders for my energy level and clarity of thought for the rest of the day.

I am going to definitely give this a shot. As a side note... typically after a rough night of drinking I automatically wake up super super early in the morning... Like if my typical routine is sleeping at 4+am and getting up close to noon every day... after a rough drinking binge I'll be up bright and early at 8-9.

That's clearly not the answer to my problems but there have been certain occasions where when I know that I need to be up early I'll drink a six pack before going to bed.

This might not have anything to do with the alcohol, it might simply be because of the fact that I really need to take a piss when I get up. Or it's that combined with the fact that alcohol dehydrates you... so my body is waking itself up not out of hunger but out of thirst?

Just something I thought I would point out... maybe someone else shares this feeling?

Note: I too am writing this at 3:28 am, hah. Time for bed! I ate around... 10pm :|

Note 2 of 2: Apparently others feel this sentiment as well, I should have done a better job scanning the replies before posting.

The original Buddhist monastic precepts required that food be restricted to one meal a day before noon. It's a good way to live, but I've only ever kept it up for a couple of months at any one time. It's socially restrictive.

i believe that the key is no to not be in excess, to truly be minimalistic about it, and not a slave to impulse.

here in california, we often expend more energy in our daily routines, rest less, and use up more mental energy doing all our problem solving and anxieties and such, than would be the case if we were practicing mindfulness most of the day, instead of feeding into our concerns (attachments) to the various things we do. during mindfulness and zazen, the mind goes into a different mode, which is in many ways, rejuvenating in itself, but this is not the case with how we - or at least i - approach problems at work.

comprehending why a practice is done, and then being true to your comprehensions is where it is at, and it is not in mimicking the implementations/practices of others.

My sleeping schedule is unimpressed by my eating schedule.

On the other hand, obeying the golden rule in the article helps me lose weight. I tracked my weight for the past 4 months with the Wii Fit, and there's pretty good correlation between not eating 12 hours before wake-up time and the day-to-day weight delta.

My bottom line: the rule about not eating too late helps, one way or another.

The explanation I have heard for this is that your metabolism (which break down molecules into smaller units and release energy) slows down some hours before you go to bed.

When you eat near bedtime you get much less restfull sleep during the first part of the night (i.e. the most important part of the night for sleep) because your metabolism is still active digesting the food.

Simple as that.

I wonder if the converse may be more true: that by eating you extend your sleep cycle for longer. I find if having to do multiple long nights, no matter how fit I am I have to eat to keep up energy.

I find the more tired, the more sugary stuff I crave.

When you're pulling long days or all nighters, you need to watch your diet. It's easy to eat too much and gain weight. At the same time, if you're really only sleeping 4 hours a night, then you need extra calories to burn for those extra waking hours.

Definitely. I usually up the volume of short intervals (tabata) when doing this type of work - less time training than usual and more metabolic effect.

anecdotal counterpoint: Last night was a session of midnight gluttony. I ate a 12" pizza, an order of fried calamari, lots of miscellaneous finger food, four beers and two mojitos. I was asleep about 2:30 am and awoke about 6 am. I drank lots of water so alcohol dehydration was not likely the cause. Usually I go to sleep around around 2 am and wake up at 7-8 am. Make of this what you will.

Pregnant?

Well I'm not sure how dangerous it really is to drink booze while gravid, but it's one form of self-experimentation I wouldn't recommend. There's plenty of real experimentation establishing the risk of things like fetal alcohol syndrome etc.

You may've awoken to urinate. Drinking a lot (of any liquid) is another good way to get yourself to wake up earlier. IIRC, people used to do it to prepare for pre-dawn raids.

The not eating for a long time gets me up earlier. I didn't think it was "magic" or anything, just my body saying "get up & feed me."

May have been the alcohol (despite the extra water). Alcohol consumption almost always makes me wake up early (and then be sleepy again several hours later).

I always thought it was partial dehydration that caused the early waking after drink - Is there anything else. I haven't really looked into it, just curious.

This seems (externally) similar to the idea of drinking lots of water so that you'll have to wake up to take a piss - except here it's being hungry that's waking you up.

My problem with sleeping, though, is falling asleep - I can wake up when I need to with sufficient alarms, but getting to sleep when I need to can be tough. There is one time when I have trouble waking up, though - after flying. However, I tend to take day flights, and doing this would end up with a day of my fasting in a widebody air plane, which would take an already-unhappy me to a whole new level.

I'm writing this at 4AM, completely off-kilter sleep schedule, so I will definitely be giving this a try from tomorrow. Other suggestions I've heard are to turn off the computer an hour before you sleep, but it's always very difficult for me to tear myself away - but not eating, that's something I can manage easily enough.

Also, step three is, in my recent experience, deadly. You'll either miss/delay the meeting, or it will be a painful hour or so while others expect you to be thinking hard.

  turn off the computer an hour before you sleep, but it's 
  always very difficult for me to tear myself away - but not 
  eating, that's something I can manage easily enough.

You know, that's a potential health issue in its own. The key is to strike a balance.

Well, of course, I didn't mean to stop eating entirely. Just after 8PM, as suggested in the article. That seems easy enough.

I agree with you regarding the health issues of spending too much time on a computer deeply absorbed in a problem. Ignoring one's basic needs becomes almost the default.

To the people talking about alcohol: it has a well-known disruptive effect on the second half of the sleep cycle. It makes you wake up earlier with less REM sleep. (For example, http://www.websciences.org/cftemplate/NAPS/archives/indiv.cf...)

The only thing that has worked for me is setting the alarm for when I want to wake up, getting myself out of bed, getting ready for the day, then leaving. Get away from the bed. That's the key.

I can sleep much longer than eight hours if I can just lay in the bed. Get up, get out, get going.

I've been having success doing this for a few years. The next thing I should try is experimenting with different fluids before sleeping. A glass of water would be a good start ... maybe an Emergen-C packet to vary.

Anecodotally, I've experienced this too. I fast from food from time to time, and whenever I do, I'm ready to sleep earlier at night and ready to get up earlier the next morning.

I should try this strategy. I haven't woken up before 2 PM for over a month now.

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