Why you should stop that crash diet now

THe scene is all too familiar: we’ve skipped breakfast or missed lunch, then found ourselves inexplicably in a rage with someone for some minor misdemeanour. Your partner’s left the milk out and all hell breaks loose. You can’t get the shopping trolley unlocked and suddenly you’re overwhelmed with a burning fury. Family, colleagues, even random passers-by are at risk of short shrift from you for no reason. In the background is the distant rumbling of your stomach.

As soon as we have something to eat, we are left red-faced and ashamed when we think back on our behaviour. It’s a clear case of being ‘hangry’.

For those not in the know, this is a phenomenon whereby people are angry as a result of being hungry.

It’s long been thought of as nothing more than an excuse for bad behaviour — a bit like when parents try to dismiss their obnoxious child’s rudeness by saying they must be tired when everyone knows the child is in need of a good telling off, not a nap.

But there’s new evidence to suggests being hangry isn’t just a lame excuse for irritability and moodiness, but instead a bona fide condition.

Last week, a study was published which looked at the emotional response of volunteers and mapped this against how hungry they were.

OVeR three weeks, volunteers recorded their feelings and hunger levels on an app five times a day, as they went about their daily business.

The results, published in the science journal Plos One, show that the effects of hunger on anger, irritability and pleasure were ‘substantial’. Hunger was to blame for increased irritability on 37 per cent of occasions; for anger 34 per cent of the time, and for ‘reduced pleasure’ in 38 per cent of cases.

I don’t know about you, but that rings very true with me. As a junior doctor, I’d often go very long stretches without food and became acutely aware that my ability to deal with stressful, irritating or frustrating situations dramatically reduced when I’d not eaten.

I remember being cross with a nurse after she’d lost a drug chart and interrupted me seeing patients in A&e to call me to rewrite it.

I’d not eaten for 12 hours and was horrified as I heard myself angrily scold her for wasting my time. she was unfazed, said nothing and simply raised an eyebrow while putting a tin of quality street in front of me.

There’s actually been evidence of the effects of hunger on mood for a long time.

A similar phenomenon to hanger has been noted by diabetics — they can tell when their blood sugar is low because they become irritable.

Many of us will be familiar with this and, personally, I always try to avoid having a difficult conversation when I’m hungry because I know there’s a risk it will blow up. But it also points to a bigger issue about the consequences of skipping meals on our mood. A fascinating u.s. study called the Minnesota starvation experiment was done in the 1940s and looked at the physical and psychological impact of restricted diets and starvation. The aim of the study was to investigate starvation in humans in light of the famines sweeping europe as doctors had no idea what the effects would be or how best to treat them. The volunteers were placed on a reduced diet of about 1,500 calories and given specific exercises to do, so that they quickly started losing weight. They were carefully monitored throughout. Researchers were shocked by what they observed. Many of the participants experienced periods of severe distress and depression. even more shocking, some resorted to self-mutilation, with one participant amputating three of his fingers with an axe. It was

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the first comprehensive study to clearly link weight loss with triggering severe mental illness.

I think this shows why, on a less dramatic level, diets can make people so miserable, particularly crash diets.

In the short term the disruption in blood glucose that this can cause results in irritability and mood fluctuations.

BuT, over a more sustained period of time, suddenly reducing calories can trigger a serious depressive illness. All this is just further evidence of why losing weight needs to be done in a slow, sensible, controlled way by making small changes to the diet and healthy choices at meal times, rather than simply slashing calories.

With summer now well and truly upon us, and with many looking forward to their first holiday since the pandemic, everyone seems to be on a crash diet. I suspect we should be prepared for quite a few hangry outbursts as a result.