system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why if I eat before going to bed I wake up painfully hungry but if I do not eat right before going to sleep I wake up feeling fine?
gpt
Even though you are asleep, your body is processing the food you eat.

Imagine your body is a big shipping warehouse. Normally, at night time, there's a very small crew just managing small amounts of packages. If at once, a large shipment arrives (you eat before sleeping), they will have to call on additional workers and charge them overtime in order to process and store the shipment promptly. If the shipments are not processed, they may cause issues for the shipping warehouse.

The overtime workers arrive and process and store the shipment but now they're annoyed that there's not much more work. You called them in from resting in their homes for just a single shipment?! They start complaining and want the supplying company to give them more shipments!

This is what happens when you eat before you sleep. Your body will automatically digest the food and put the nutrients into your body. The nutrients have to go somewhere or else the high concentration will be toxic to your body (for example, high blood sugar). One type of protein, insulin, helps push sugars into cells. However, if you eat a lot, more insulin has to be released to process all that digested food.

When there is too much insulin in your body and not much sugar for it to work on (after it's done processing the food), it will trigger a sense of hunger that you will get when you wake up.