Girl eating in sleep

Not long after Amy Koechler knew, she began to behave very oddly. Almost every night, Koechler got out of bed and fumbled into the kitchen to find food, though he did not wake up .

While everyone heard about the sleepwalking phenomenon, Amy fell into a completely different situation, almost still a mystery. It is called SRED (sleep-related eating disorder), also known as eating during sleep.

More than 1 million Americans suffer from this strange situation, and most of them are women. Doctors are almost certain that genes, not hunger, have stimulated them to do so. In Koechler's case, she inherited a sleep disorder from her mother, Shirley.

Anna Ryan, recorded by the camera, is eating in the night without even waking up.Photo: ABC.

Koechler, now 24, recounted the story she had grown up with this night's meals.

When I fell asleep, "I got out of bed in the middle of the night and found some Girl Scout cookies. I woke my mother up and asked her to drink tea. And she was annoyed because I kept waking her up."

Her mother, Mrs. Shirley recalls: "Amy went upstairs and she flapped her wings like a duck. We knew she was sleepwalking, her eyes showed she didn't wake up. Sometimes she looked at me and screamed." I'm hungry! "

Koechler ate all night until adulthood. And trips to the kitchen become more frequent.

"Not 1, but 6, 7 even 8 times per night," she recalls. "There were times when I got out of bed just half an hour after I fell asleep."

But somehow, despite eating for two decades, she still wasn't overweight. As for Anna Ryan, another patient of this disorder, the consequences are much more severe. She increased to 27 kg in a year and half of it was due to night eating.

Eat without consciousness

First, she didn't even know what she did.

"Every morning, I woke up and felt as if I was out of bed , " she said.

Ryan didn't know why he woke up in exhaustion and why she couldn't keep her eyes open during the day. When the doctor asked Ryan to participate in a sleep study, she said it was not necessary. But the research results surprised her. Turns out, Ryan almost every night went to find food in the refrigerator or in the kitchen.

Like most people eating in other sleeps, Ryan could not recall his night trips, but she still wanted to know what it was like. The cameras helped her see that, when recording 5 trips to her kitchen in just 2 nights.

Ryan's doctor, Scott Eveloff, said the food she put in her stomach during sleep was a remarkable thing. "She ignored fruits or other useful foods, only aimed at non-nutritious things, ate a lot and in a very sloppy way. It was behavioral eating in classic sleep , " Eveloff said.

The first time he saw his own clip, Ryan was shocked. "I could not recognize that I was eating in bed, lying down and eating again. It was more terrible than I thought."

And almost everyone in her case was shocked when she saw another image of herself. But Dr. Carlos Schenck, author of "Sleep: Mysteries, Problems and Solutions", thinks that people don't need to panic, because that's not their personality. According to Schenck, eating while sleeping is a medical problem, "a physiological force coming from deep in the brain and body".

Researchers have found that the brain of a person eating while sleeping responds differently to a normal brain. During normal sleeps, the movement control brain also rests. But in people with SRED, this part of the brain is "awake", and it involves all kinds of physical activity. Meanwhile, the brain region controlling reason and judgment is still fast asleep.

Therefore, "they got out of bed and looked around. They knew where the kitchen was, but they didn't judge anything, there was no inhibition at all," Schenck said.

After 20 years living with this situation, Amy Koechler decided to ask for help. She used a few drugs that prevented this process, and it worked. Sometimes she still finds the kitchen, but not the one who travels all night as before. Now there can be really good sleep, but only when taking medicine.

Anna Ryan, unfortunately, did not respond quickly to such drugs.

So doctors have to coordinate other drugs for her. And after months of testing, new drugs were discovered to help her sleep the whole night, while losing weight. And your kitchen? It was silent, deserted, and not disturbed.