How I Hacked My Hanger
And You Can Too
I usually spend my day either writing or programming. I enjoy these activities because they put me in a flow-state. The problem with being in flow is the same as the benefit: whatever I am doing absorbs me. I want to add a new feature to the website I am building or finish one more paragraph of my book and nothing else matters. Because of this, and because I hate to cook, I always put off eating until I am hangry. If you are not familiar with hangry, it is when you are angry due to hunger.
Even when I am responsible and eat on a regular schedule, I am still prone to hangriness. Recently, I ate a big breakfast (pancakes) then went with my family for an hour and a half drive to go hiking. Despite eating a Clif Bar on the way there, by the time we arrived, instead of hiking, we immediately had to go to lunch because I was crashing so hard from the syrupy pancakes. This situation happens to me all of the time. Aside from the inconvenience of being unable to go anywhere without having to eat upon arrival, my inability to control my blood sugar was also causing problems in my relationships. When I am hangry, I snap, and nobody likes that. My Fiancée finally said,
“If you snap at me one more time, I am going to kill you.”
So I decided to address the problem. I started researching what was happening to me. I learned most Americans are on a diet consisting of 60% or more carbohydrates. Your body turns these carbohydrates into glucose (blood sugar), which your brain uses for energy. When the amount of glucose in your blood runs low, your brain interprets it as a life threatening event, which is accurate because if your blood sugar gets too low, you will enter hypoglycemia and die. Hence, you get hangry when your blood sugar drops. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because if you were running out of glucose in the wild, and remained calm and relaxed about getting more food (no problem, you can cut me in line to get more deer), you wouldn’t survive.
My research led me to a book called The Ketogenic Diet for Type 1 Diabetes: Reduce Your Hba1c and Avoid Diabetic Complications, which I read in one day and loved. It talked about how although most Americans run on carbs, you can actually program your body to run on an alternative fuel source. If you switch to a high-fat, low-carb diet like the ketogenic diet, your liver starts producing ketone bodies from all the fat, which your body can use as fuel instead of glucose. Eventually, you can enter a state called ketosis where your body can run solely on ketones. Because your diet and body provide plenty of fat, you have a plentiful source of energy, which stabilizes your blood sugar because your brain is not constantly worried about running out of glucose. In other words, a high-fat, low-carb diet is the cure for hangriness.
I started a ketogenic diet the next day. For breakfast, I had a shake with cashew milk, two eggs, and coconut oil. I was able to work until 12:30 and felt completely fine. You would not want to be around me if I drank a protein shake instead, or if I ate a high carb breakfast. For lunch, I had half a stick of butter with cinnamon. It wasn’t very good at first, but I put it in the microwave and melted it, which was surprisingly delicious.
Warning: I am not a doctor, please consult one before getting too excited about this article and switching to an all butter diet. I waited a few hours, and I felt fantastic. All I had eaten for the day was a shake and butter, and I was not hangry at all, and I had noticeably more energy. For dinner, I had steak and a salad and went to bed feeling full and happy, without snapping once that day.
I realize I probably did not enter ketosis after one day. But I am shocked at how well switching to a low-carb, high-fat diet controlled my blood sugar, and how good it made me feel. I am so happy with the results I am sticking with it. I even ordered a ketone monitor so that I can measure my ketone bodies going forward. I am on day three, and I am excited to see what happens (ketosis is also supposed to result in improved mental clarity). For now, I am happy with having cured my hangriness once and for all.
If you enjoyed this article please share it or give it a few claps. You can find more articles like this at selftaught.blog. Also, check out The Self-Taught Programmer book and course. Thanks for reading!
