Hi Robert,

I find I do this too. It goes in fits and starts and like you I seem to have the choice of eat something and sleep or don't eat and not get back to sleep again.
I do have some other issues in that I have Rheumatoid Arthritis and I do get a lot of pain and that can keep me up (I am going through a bad patch at the moment) but there are times when pain has nothing to do with it. When I get the need to eat I do try and just drink water and if that fails then I have something legal like cheese or cold meat.
I guess because I rarely get a good nights sleep I will indulge the odd night of snacking since I know eating will let me sleep because if it's pain related I often don't get back to sleep. However there have been periods when I have felt it has become a habit and it does bother me.
Now if we as living organisms function better eating every few hours then doesn't it seem logical that some of us can't fast overnight and "feel the need" to eat while others can sleep? Not that I want to justify our problem but I am trying understand why it happens. I had a terrible time this summer when I came out of the hospital and decided I would treat my little problem the same way I dealt with all of my eating it would be counted in that days total with my day beginging in the morning. So it I eat over night I must have room for it in my program before I could eat it.
I wish I could give you an answer to help you stop as I know where you are coming from but for me I decided it was a quirk of being me and for those nights I wake up hungry I must have not eaten enough during the day. I figure with all my other issues it I could tame the insomnia monster with food then I would feed it. The pain monster isn't so easily squashed.
I hope my rambling helps, even if it only says you are not alone.

Steph