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By Dean L. Jones, C.P.M.
There are wonderful feelings that come about from getting up in age. I remember as a child up through my twenties from time-to-time experiencing some really intense hunger contractions in my stomach. They were not so bad, but memorable enough to want to avoid them as much as possible. Normal hunger pangs usually last about 30-seconds and do not begin until 12 to 24 hours after the last ingestion of food. When you are busy or having emotional states like anger or joy food is sometimes the last thing on your mind. But when your blood sugar levels drop your hunger feeling increases and are really intensified for those with diabetes.
For us older folks it is normal to have fewer hunger contraction periods, but there is one time of day that I could not explain until recently that I think is worth sharing. After a normal night’s sleep, whenever I eat breakfast before or around 9 AM, I usually get pretty extreme hunger pangs about two hours after eating the breakfast. Sometimes it feels like I have not eaten all day. Well, I recently learned that particular feeling is normal for a lot of people because breakfast time coincides with our body’s circadian cortisol peak — the time of day when our cortisol (stress hormone) levels rise and reach their peak.
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