I braced myself for hangry.
Genuinely thought skipping meals would turn me into someone nobody wanted to be around. Everyone’s got a fasting-and-mood horror story: the snapping, the crashes, the “don’t talk to me before I’ve eaten.” I fully expected to become that person.
You’ve probably heard the same advice I grew up on: eat little and often, keep the blood sugar steady, never let yourself get hungry. It sounds sensible. It sounds like the responsible choice.
So for the best part of two years, I logged my mood every single day. Fasting days. Eating days. Good days and rubbish ones, no cherry-picking. What that log actually says isn’t the story either side of this argument wants to hear.
The Advice I Never Questioned
Eat little and often. Keep the engine ticking over. Never let yourself get hungry, whatever you do.
I followed some version of that for most of my adult life. It’s not even really NHS guidance, more just the water everyone swims in: six small meals a day, a snack before you’re starving, never skip breakfast.
And on the surface, it makes complete sense. If blood sugar swings are the problem, smoothing them out sounds like the smart move.
Tim Spector’s got a nice line for this. He calls it eating like a cow: constant grazing, never really stopping. When someone put it to nutrition scientist Sarah Berry, she admitted it outright. “I certainly eat like a cow.”
That was me too, for decades. Lions don’t eat like that. A big kill, then nothing for a day or two. It turns out that pattern is rather better for metabolic health than the constant-grazing one, which is an odd thing to learn at fifty-three.
What’s Actually Happening When Blood Sugar Spikes
Little and often keeps insulin elevated for most of the day. It never really lets your gut rest, and it never lets the metabolic switch flip from burning what you just ate to burning what you’re storing.
Here’s the part nobody explained to me. Healthy blood sugar doesn’t mean low blood sugar. It means stable blood sugar. Picture the difference between the Yorkshire Dales and a ski slope. The Dales roll gently, up and down, predictable. A ski slope goes straight up, then drops away vertically. Both involve height changes. The experience, and the impact on everything riding it, is completely different.
After every sharp blood sugar spike comes a sharp drop. That drop is what drives the fatigue, the cravings, and the urge to eat again before you’re genuinely hungry.
Biochemist Jessie Inchauspé, who wrote Glucose Revolution, points to a 2011 Yale study that stuck with me. Brain scans showed that when blood glucose crashes after a spike, the brain’s craving centre lights up. Not “you’re hungry.” “You need sugar, now.”
Tim Spector ran his own version of this. Twenty-four hours, one muffin, and the blood sugar spike alone caused measurable cognitive impairment and mood collapse. Not from missing a meal. From the spike, and the crash that followed it.
So the question I never actually asked myself for about twenty-five years: is hangry hunger, or is it withdrawal?
Twenty-Five Years I Never Checked
Age five, 1978. My GP’s advice for a hyperactive kid was a can of Coke a day. “Keeps the doctor away,” apparently. I’m not making that up. That was the actual guidance at the time.
By sixteen, a can had become six litres a day. Full-fat, not diet. Hyperactive, wound tight, “all over the place,” in my own mum’s words. Nobody clocked it as a blood sugar pattern. Everyone clocked it as a personality.
I quit Coke properly in my thirties. Felt like a genuine win. Then, within weeks: sweets. Then biscuits. Then puddings became a fairly permanent fixture. The addiction didn’t leave. It just changed its outfit. Same wiring, different fuel.
Twenty-five-odd years of that, and never once tested the opposite. Never went a stretch without food and actually checked what happened to my mood, because the assumption was baked in: no food, no fuel, no you. I’d have told you, with total confidence, that skipping meals made me a nightmare to be around. Never actually checked.
What the Data Actually Showed
Somewhere into this whole WMTWL journey, in 2025, I started logging mood every single day. Not just fasting days. Every day.
It wasn’t really a decision to fix anything. It was more that I’d made enough claims about fasting on this channel that I figured I ought to actually check whether the hangry fear held up, instead of just repeating what I’d always assumed.
Small thing worth being honest about. This wasn’t something I sat down with my GP about specifically. Mood tracking isn’t blood-test territory, and it’s not medication-related, so there was no appointment, nothing to report back. Same principle as everything else on this channel though: track it properly first, then talk about it if something looks off.
Between January and October 2025, I tracked 295 days. 252 of them were fasting days.
Average mood on fasting days: 7.9 out of 10. Average mood on eating days across that same stretch: 8.4.
So on paper, fasting loses. Lower number.
Except that’s not the whole story, and it’s the bit that surprised me. Look at the volatility, not just the average. Eating days swung from about a 4 up to a 9, day to day, meal to meal. Post-meal slumps. Sugar crashes mid-afternoon. Fasting days sat in a tight, boring band, mostly 7 to 8. No crashes. No swings.
Stable 7.9 beats volatile 8.4. That’s not a typo. It’s just what happens when you stop measuring the peak and start measuring the whole line.
I’m not going to pretend it was flat the entire way through, because it wasn’t. Day four of a fast, October 2025. Four hours’ sleep the night before. Mood that day: 6 out of 10. The lowest fasting number in the entire dataset.
Worth being precise about what actually caused that dip, though, because it wasn’t the fast. It was the sleep. The same pattern shows up every time poor sleep and fasting stack on the same day. Take the sleep away, and the fasting days on their own barely move.
What This Doesn’t Mean
This isn’t a blanket “everyone should stop eating regularly.” If you’re on insulin or any glucose-lowering medication, or you’ve got a history of hypoglycaemia, skipping meals isn’t a mood experiment. It’s a medical one, and it needs your GP involved before you touch it. Little and often exists for good reasons in plenty of situations. This is about whether it’s true for everyone, not whether it’s ever true.
The guidelines didn’t get this wrong out of carelessness. They were written before this level of blood sugar tracking was something an ordinary person could do at home. The advice made sense with the tools available then. It just didn’t have this data yet.
If you’re not on any medication, not in that conversation, but you notice your own mood swinging hard around meals, it’s genuinely worth raising. Sugar cravings can be loud. Loud enough that you assume it’s just your personality, the way I did for twenty-five years, rather than a pattern worth a proper look before it turns into something bigger.
This isn’t about eating less, or gritting your teeth through hunger. It’s about finding out what your own data actually says, rather than what you assumed it would say.
I braced for misery. What I found, in my case, was something closer to relief. I’ll leave that with you.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- Stable beat volatile: Average mood was lower on fasting days (7.9 vs 8.4), but fasting days were far more consistent, no crashes, no swings.
- “Hangry” may be withdrawal, not hunger: the brain’s craving response fires after a blood sugar crash, not from missing a meal itself.
- One dip, one clear cause: the lowest fasting day across 295 tracked days came down to four hours’ sleep, not the fast itself.
- This isn’t for everyone: anyone on glucose-lowering medication needs their GP involved before changing meal patterns.
- Twenty-five years of assumption, never tested: the only way to know is to actually track it yourself.
Ready to Start Your Own Rhythm Reset?
If reading this has made you curious about your own patterns around food and mood, the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide is the place to start. It walks through eating windows, what to eat, and how to build a rhythm that fits your day, without guessing.
👉 Get the 14-Day Rhythm Reset Guide (free)
💪 Want ongoing support? Join Rhythm Club for £30/month (includes FREE app access, community, and weekly accountability calls)
⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
Questions? Email hello@waymorethanweightloss.com
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