Health & Wellness

Why You’re Bloated, Exhausted, and Hungry All Day—And How to Fix It, According to ‘Everything Is The Best’

November 26, 2025

You know that morning routine you swear is fine? The one where you roll out of bed, inhale an iced coffee on an empty stomach, and convince yourself a protein bar counts as breakfast? You feel amazing for like…11 minutes, and then suddenly you’re shaky, starving, irritable, and wondering why the whole day already feels unfixable. On Everything Is The Best, host Pia Baroncini sits down with nutritionist Sarah Wragge to explain why that whole pattern isn’t a personality flaw or “just adulthood,” but literally a blood sugar crash you built before 9 a.m. Wragge spent years bloated, exhausted, overexercising, and thinking she was doing wellness right, until she realized her breakfast (or lack of one) was tanking her every single day.

Here’s what she figured out—and how you can finally get out of the morning-crash cycle too.

The morning spike sets you up to fail

Before she changed anything in her routine, Wragge’s “normal” didn’t feel great. “I was probably about 25 pounds heavier than I am now,” she shares. “And it was just my normal…it was like my baseline—I was just bloated. I didn’t go to the bathroom a lot. I had acid reflux.”

She thought that was simply how bodies worked. But in reality, it’s what happens when your blood sugar spikes before you’ve even opened your laptop and your system spends the rest of the day scrambling to stabilize.

Now, when Wragge works with clients, the first thing she does is put a continuous glucose monitor on them, and the pattern is always the same. “Once you spike in the morning, it’s really hard to rebound throughout the day,” she explains. “So once you spike, it’s hard to normalize again.”

The result is a full-day rollercoaster: sugar high → insulin surge → crash → hunger → cravings → repeat.

And the worst part is that the things often causing those spikes look healthy. “A lot of us will grab a protein bar or like a yogurt with some flavoring in it or a gluten-free muffin,” Wragge says. “You’re not fueling, you’re not eating protein, and you’re spiking your blood sugar.”

Stop exercising to punish yourself

“I spent many years skipping breakfast, doing like a blueprint—not eating till three, doing HIIT workouts,” Baroncini admits. The result? “I had Moon Face…I had the roundest cortisol face for so long…I couldn’t get pregnant. It took me a long time to get pregnant with my daughter.”

It’s the wellness trap so many people fall into, feeling awful, then doubling down on the habits that are making everything worse. Wragge sees it constantly. “When you don’t feel good, you do things that you think are going to make you feel good, which is to go and exercise again,” she says. You wake up bloated or stressed, so you punish yourself with another workout or restrict food even harder. It feels productive in the moment, but it’s actually sending your body deeper into burnout.

Wragge lived it too. “It was massive overexercising for stress management,” she explains. When she couldn’t shut her brain off, she’d have three tequilas to crash. Wake up feeling terrible, then “I’ll just work out again.” It’s a vicious cycle where you’re constantly trying to undo damage with more damage.

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The small changes that actually work

“If you start to exercise correctly and efficiently with correct form and you start to sleep and then your diet is pretty good, you’re going to be amazed what happens even in like two weeks’ time,” Wragge says. And honestly? She’s right. The biggest shifts don’t come from adding more workouts, buying trendy supplements, or reinventing your entire personality at sunrise. They come from fixing the tiny habits you do the second your day starts.

Hydrate before anything else

“Drink a ton of water in the morning right when you wake up,” Wragge suggests. “Anywhere between 16 ounces and a liter of water before your feet hit the floor.” You’ve been fasting for 8+ hours—your body is dehydrated. That first hit of H2O wakes up digestion, flushes out last night’s bloat, and helps calm your nervous system before coffee kicks in.

Alkalize to kick puffiness to the curb

“Hot water with lemon…bone broth with lemon, something to alkalize to get rid of that inflammation,” she explains. Think of this as a warm wake-up call for your gut. The heat relaxes your digestive tract, lemon gives your system a gentle nudge, and the whole combo helps ease that puffy, sluggish feeling you rolled out of bed with.

Make protein the main character at breakfast

“Start your day with protein,” Wragge says. “Do not eat something sugary, don’t eat toast with jelly.” She recommends a protein-rich smoothie, eggs, or chia seed pudding—anything that keeps your blood sugar steady instead of slingshotting you into a crash.

Of course, every body is different, and it’s always smart to check in with your medical team before making big changes to your routine. But if you’re craving more simple, doable shifts like these, you can hear the full conversation on Everything Is The Best, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.