Roll back the clock, this was me!

(or, a pre-breakfast post on the value of breakfast)

A WashPost article (here) describes an old health issue that has been retrieved out of the closet and reconsidered in light of the obesity epidemic in this country: NES (Nighttime Eating Syndrome). According to experts, persons with NES have a tendency to eat most of their calories after dinner (as best as I can understand from the article, there are “chemical-brain” issues that predispose some toward this), they then cannot sleep fitfully, and wake up not especially hungry for breakfast, repeating the cycle over and over again. Ultimately, what gets you in trouble is your messed up circadian eating rhythms (though I’m still not sure if this is the result or the cause of NES).

Looking back over my graduate school years (less so later in law school) I have to say that this describes me to the last inch. It also describes a great number of students I hung out with, and perhaps a great number of people today, since the article tells us that some significant portion of the population manifests symptoms of NES.
One of the solutions, according to the authors, is to reprogram your system by forcing yourself to start each day with breakfast. Of course, a person who is wolfing all sorts of heavy duty calories at 1 am hardly feels like granola at 7 am the next day, but the strategy makes sense to me (and indeed, it is one I eventually adopted since I was later surrounded by breakfast-eaters and did not want to miss out on the morning fun; it took me years to realize that no one ever has FUN at the breakfast table, but by then I was addicted to my morning granola).

It’s nice to know that there’s a label for just about every bad habit that you pick up in life. Had I known then that I was a marked NES-er, I may have felt a great urge to dig myself out of NES-dom. At the very least, I would have tried the breakfast routine.