Step 1: During an overnight (about 12 hour) fast, the body shifts to maintaining blood glucose using hepatic glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis. Gluconeogenesis clearly rises to help supply glucose, so option 3 is correct.
Step 2: Blood glucose is kept within the normal range during an overnight fast precisely because of these mechanisms, so it does not fall significantly. This makes option 1 wrong.
Step 3: Free fatty acids and ketone bodies such as beta-hydroxybutyrate become markedly elevated only later, after about 2 to 3 days of fasting, in the prolonged starvation phase, not during a simple overnight fast. So options 2 and 4 are not the best answers for this short fast.
Step 4: Therefore the change most characteristic of an overnight fast is increased gluconeogenesis.