Sleep Your Way to Abs
When you think about ways to lose weight, you probably think of exercising more and/or eating less. You probably aren’t thinking that you need to sleep more...but you do.
We are more sleep deprived now than we have ever been! With our fast-paced lives and high stress factors, we have thrown our hormones out of balance and our circadian rhythm suffers.
Without that balance in certain hormones, we pack on the pounds around our bellies even while we sleep!
How Much Sleep Do I Need and How Will Help Weight Loss?
In order to optimize your sleep for fat loss (and good health) you need to find a good balance of solid sleep. It is recommended that you get at least 7-9 hours of sleep each night. The range accounts for personal differences in sleep needs.
During times of higher stress, your body will need more sleep than it usually does to recover and reset your hormones.
We all know how important sleep is but how does this relate to you losing weight though? The link between less sleep and higher body weight has a clear message from growing research. Here are 3 ways that not getting enough sleep is hurting your weight loss efforts.
Sleep and Leptin
Leptin is the “satiety hormone” and is released from your fat cells. Leptin travels from your fat cells to your brain and binds to receptors in appetite center of brain. It then stimulates fatty tissue to burn energy.
Higher levels of leptin will reduce your appetite and increase your metabolic rate. Women have twice as much as men but have a harder time triggering its effect.
Sleep is a major effector of leptin. Research shows that just one night of deficient sleep (4-6hrs) can cause up to a 20% decrease in leptin levels. This has a profound effect on weight gain, weight loss.
Sleep & Ghrelin
Ghrelin is another hormone which is released from your digestive tract that controls your appetite, known as the hunger hormone. Reducing calories (as you would as part of a weight loss diet) leads to a sustained increase in ghrelin levels, so you already have one strike against you with respects to ghrelin.
Ghrelin promotes the formation of abdominal fat near the liver, the really bad kind, promotes fatty liver and increases the risk of developing insulin resistance.
All this translates to metabolic syndrome.
Inadequate sleep causes a rise in ghrelin levels. Data from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study showed that sleeping 5 vs. 8 hours a night lead to a 15% increase in ghrelin levels.
The negative changes with leptin and ghrelin that occur when you don’t get enough sleep drive you to eat more calories, while your body is primed to burn less calories.
Sleep & Cortisol
Cortisol is your stress hormone. It has a healthy effect on your weight loss when in balance. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case with so many. As stress increases, so does cortisol. As cortisol increases, sleep decreases.
The by-product of that is weight gain.
Also, eating 2-3 hours before bed inhibits the release of cortisol. By avoiding eating before you go to sleep, allows your body to metabolize energy stores such as fat through the use of cortisol.
To help keep your cortisol levels in check, eliminate caffeine after noon hour, improve your posture, lights out at 10 pm to reduce stimulus, adhere to sound nutrition, learn to breathe properly and don’t do really long cardio workouts – it produces more cortisol.
If you need a little help, supplement with B5 & B6 at night as it acts as a natural sleep aid.
Successful Sleeping
Here are 8 ways to get a better sleep:
• Stay in a routine: Go to bed at the same time each night.
• Avoid alcohol: Alcohol decreases the quality of the sleep that you get.
• Make your room dark: Sleeping in a dark room will help improve the quality of your sleep.
• Disconnect early: Disconnect from technology 1 hour before bed. This will allow the brain to settle from the stimulus and you will sleep better.
• Avoid stimulants: Minimize your intake of caffeine later in the day to ensure it doesn’t impact your ability to get to sleep.
• Stay cool: the necessary stages of sleep occur more readily at cooler temperatures.
• Have a great bed: You spend a good portion of your life in it! Having a great bed can be the difference between getting good and bad sleeps.
• Stretch before bed: Stretching stimulates the rest and recovery part of our nervous system. Spend 5-7 minutes stretching before bed to help your body relax.
Yours in Health!
…and sleep.
