Medical reasons for hunger-induced meltdowns?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m normally, when not hungry, a pretty easy-going and not particularly emotional person, and I never yell at other people. But my whole life, when I get hungry, I get extremely emotional and the slightest, stupidest things upset me. For example, I once started yelling at a bunch of my friends because I thought they had insulted and offended me by making the seating arrangements such that I was not in the place I thought they should have given me. Super stupid, right? Turns out, it was mostly because dinner was two hours late (we were at a restaurant with a long wait time), and when I had had something to eat I felt properly ashamed of myself. Basically everyone who knows me in real life enough to eat meals with me knows that I need my meals on time, or else I’m liable to start weeping uncontrollably, yelling at someone for some perceived slight, or severely frustrated with something incredibly stupid and trivial.

My four-year-old daughter has inherited this tendency from me. Although she has temper problems for other reasons (see my other thread), it’s basically magnified a hundredfold when she’s hungry.

So now my husband wants to know, is there a medical reason? It seems to me that when I tell people about this problem that they often say, “Oh, I get emotional when I haven’t eaten too,” especially women. There’s even a word for it: hangry! But my husband thinks that I’m more extreme than the usual manifestation of this (how he would know this I’m not entirely sure, as he doesn’t really hang out with that many women, and his family doesn’t seem prone to it), and maybe there is a medical issue that could be pinpointed and solved, or that I could get better advice on how to deal with it besides “have meals on time,” and that we could then help our daughter more. So he’s been pushing me to get checked out by a doctor, and I guess I will to keep him happy.

However, I am skeptical that such a better solution exists, or that a diagnosis of “easily gets low blood sugar” or whatever, even if it existed, would tell me anything useful that I didn’t know. But I am willing to be proven wrong. I know that the Dope is not a doctor, you are not my doctor, etc.; still, do you have any thoughts or anything you think I might look out for?

Other data of interest: to arrest this problem I (and my daughter) have to have carbs. Protein doesn’t work very well; neither does pure sugar. Fruit is a little better but doesn’t work nearly as well as carbs. I got a bunch of blood tests when I was pregnant last year as well as before I got pregnant, and none of them came up with any problems. I have had hypothyroidism in the past, but it somehow cleared up when my daughter was born and I haven’t had issues since. (I also was pushing my meals quite late around the time I was diagnosed, and when my daughter was born I stopped doing that and just ate at my natural time. I also want to credit this with the disappearance of the hypothyroidism, although at least one doctor has told me that it doesn’t work that way.)

2

From here

“Our guts and our brains are not as disconnected as we may think, Currie adds. The appetite hormone ghrelin, for instance, is produced in the stomach, but receptors for ghrelin are present elsewhere throughout the body, including the brain’s hypothalamus. In addition to stimulating feelings of hunger, ghrelin can also produce an anxiety response that goes away when you eat.”

3

My family members are prone to the same phenomena but in our case it’s protein that solves the problem fastest, not carbs.

Which is why I get really irritated when people try to start forcing candy bars on me when I say I’m getting crabby because I’m hungry. NO! I need FOOD, not junk! Sugar is the worst thing, I get that sudden rush then BOOM!, crash! And more snarling.

Anyhow - the older I get the less I’m prone to this. And it’s a relief. I used to have to eat RIGHT NOW!!! when I got up in the morning and now I can go an hour without a problem most mornings.

4

OP, how much carbs does it take to get you back on an even keel? A rice crispy treat worth? A 12 ounce bag of salted pretzels worth? I’m just wondering if this is something that can be solved with some snack that you can simply carry around.

As far as a discernible medical cause to your condition, I’ll defer to more medically trained personnel. That said, it does not seem implausible for an individual to be extra sensitive to hypoglycemia.

5

Yeah but it’s not necessarily hypoglycemia. I have the same issue as the OP - I get really cranky and light-headed if I skip meals. I used to think that it was low blood sugar.

Then I became diabetic and the first time I got cranky hungry, I was like Yeah! I’m running low! Let’s check!

Nope. Blood sugar was fine. I was just cranky hungry. The two are not necessarily the same. In fact, with me, when I’m truly low, it’s a different feeling than cranky hungry. Some similarities, but definitely not the same.

6

Sounds like the OP is a giant toddler!

Seriously though, I think most people suffer from this to some degree, although the OP’s reaction is a bit extreme. I tend to get much more easily annoyed, and less patient than I am if I’m not hungry, but I don’t weep unexplainedly or get super-emotional.

If it’s not a medical condition, the solution is probably to learn your warning signs and to carry snacks with you.

7

It was my understanding that the adrenaline surges from low blood sugar bring it back up. So you have a mix of starvation and adrenaline going on.

I had a problem where on days that I exercised I would get panic attacks at night when trying to sleep. My blood sugar was normal. Eventually I found other people online who had the same problem and said it was low liver glycogen. I started eating a couple hundred calories in high fructose sugar before bed on days I exercise and the problem stopped.

8

I have a friend who does this. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed it, but she knows it happens so she’s mentioned it to me before.

That’s all I know, tho. Just wanted to let you know it’s not just you!

9

Yeah, I always carry snacks with me, and my husband has put little snack caches in the car, in my backpack, etc. Don’t worry, I have that covered :slight_smile: It’s more that my husband is looking for potential other solutions… I don’t know exactly what he has in mind, actually, I should ask him to be more specific… maybe something like, if you took a pill for a week it would all go away? Which is funny, considering how many actually diagnosable medical problems have “watching one’s diet” as a component of the solution, and I already have that solution for this problem!

Broomstick, I hear you – for me, it’s people who try to get me to drink fruit juice or milk. I’m sorry, that’s just not going to help me. (Chocolate bars are not terrible in this respect, since usually they have some carbs, but not as good as, say, bread.)

Athena, I love that it’s not actually low blood sugar! (A friend of mine who’s a doctor also mentioned to me that I would probably have different and more definitive symptoms if that was the case.)

10

One possible explanation might be that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source:

http://www.uky.edu/~njdewa2/gailliotetal07JPSP.pdf

11

Yeah, carrying snacks is important - I usually have some beef jerky or nuts on me during work so if I’m feeling a bit gnarly I can grab something quick on my break. Since interacting with the public is now an important part of making a living it’s sort of important I avoid the hangry.

That’s the other thing - being older I’ve had more experience in dealing with it, developing ways to mitigate it, etc. That, and my metabolism is slowing down. Sure, it was nice in one sense back in the day when I could eat as much as I wanted as often as I wanted, but sometimes it was a drag needing to eat on a very regular basis. These days, it’s not as painful to delay or skip a meal.

So, it might get less intense as you get older.

12

Just to clarify, carbs are sugar. Fruit has sugars, but it has a lower glycemic index than, say, white bread, because fruit has fiber, and the fiber slows digestion of the sugar. Fruit juice has no fiber, and its sugars are absorbed as quickly as soda. Milk has sugar, but it also has protein and fat, both of which slow absorption. So, what you’re talking about may be more the difference between low- and high-glycemic index foods. Or, it may be a placebo effect where you’ve made an association that Food A brings relief while Food B doesn’t help at all.

I have a milder version of the same problem, in that I get a killing headache and become shaky and weepy if I’ve gone too long without food, and the best thing to make me feel better is a big sloppy burger. I’ve learned, as well, that it’s not about my blood sugar, and that while low blood sugar and hunger often happen together, I can still get screamingly hungry while my blood sugar’s fine, and my blood sugar can dip while I don’t feel hungry at all. I can also differentiate between two types of hunger - stomach hunger, when my stomach starts growling and I get these weird little burps, and brain hunger, which is far stronger and does give me the hangries. I can ignore stomach hunger for hours just by drinking water, but once the brain hunger starts, I have to deal with it.

13

Saltines. I keep saltines around for these “attacks.” I don’t cry, but I can be damn mean to people around me for what turns out to be no reason but hunger. And typically, it just takes a bite or 2 of something to calm me down.

14

Probably not. As a Type 1 diabetic, the bits that control glucose and insulin are all messed up. If my body responded to low blood sugar with adrenaline surges to bring it back up, my life would be WAY easier. And even in the off chance that happened, I would have seen the low on my continuous glucose monitor.

Us T1s tend to be hyper aware of blood sugar drops, because, unlike you non-pancreatically-challenged people, we can drop dead from them. Makes you rather vigilant. :smiley: