Come Sleep EAT With Me?

So, for those of us who fight the good fight, trying to balance sleep and exercise and eating, all in the midst of the chaos of life, there's a new enemy for a select few in our ranks.  SLEEP EATING.

Yup, you are reading that correctly.  No need to adjust your screen or scramble around for your reading spectacles.  Some people can spend their waking hours nibbling and gnawing with conscious care, pounding the pavement in their running shoes -- or walking -- only to have it all undone during their unconscious hours.

As deep as my adoration for food runs, consuming an entire carton of ice cream while standing in the light of the open freezer door or munching through a bag of potato chips at the kitchen counter OR cuddling with a box of Life cereal in bed, all with eyes wide shut and unseeing: those are nightmare scenarios.  And yet in the past week, someone very close to me has discovered she is the 'less than 1 out of every 1,000 people' who take Ambien to drift off into LaLaLand, only to succumb to a chemical trigger which not only puts them to sleep but also stimulates the appetite on a large scale; it's considered a rare side effect.  She WOULD be the one to respond to it.  If her sweetie hadn't injured his back and found himself up at night recently, her rampant snacking could have continued unchecked until the bare shelves raised their own questions!  As it was, he had to wrestle with her, losing once or twice, to stop her midnight pantry raids.  She even argued with him.  He locked the fridge.  Took a picture of her, zoned out and pigging out, to show her the next morning.  You can imagine her shock.  I think I might have been horrified.

I took it upon myself to do a bit of research on this curiosity.  That's how I stumbled upon the earlier statistic.  But what I also discovered alarmed me even further.  Sleep eaters can heap a world of hurt upon themselves.  They've turned on stoves and swallowed utensils, including knives, and all of this with no awareness of their actions; they could conceivably wake up with painful burns or internal bleeding and have no earthly idea what's happening to them.  It reminds me of an NPR-sponsored movie I recently watched, "Sleepwalk With Me."  The main character -- it's auto-biographical, with the real stand-up comic playing a thinly disguised version of himself -- begins to sleepwalk, seriously sleepwalk, after the pressure from his family to marry his longtime girlfriend becomes to much for him to consciously handle.  He freaks out after encountering a jackal in his bedroom in one memorable scene; in another incident, he ascends an award podium in a grassy field to accept his medal and then jumps off . . . only to land on his DVD player because he was atop a shelf in his living room.  But it took him fleeing a missile in his hotel room and jumping through, THROUGH, his window from the second story to spur him into action of the self-preservation kind.  Now, he takes specific medications to dull his propensity for sleepwalking.  He also zips himself into a mummy bag each night and dons mittens in order to hamper his physical movement.  Hearing him describe his thrashing about in that contraption, and then seeing it on screen, was hilarious.  But MAN, oh MAN, what could have been!

This is a heads-up if Ambien is your sleep-aid, my friends.  You may want to have someone in your household check on you to see if YOU are that less than '1 out of every 1,000.'  If you live alone, a tripwire attached to a camera might be necessary.  At the very least, weigh yourself before bedtime and after bedtime -- see if those numbers jive.  You could be sabotaging yourself unawares.

Yikes!

POSTSCRIPT:

HAPPY 23RD BIRTHDAY TO MY OLDEST BABY!
LOVE YOU, MISS ASHLEY . . .