Hi Jimi,
Did you know that being short on sleep can affect your weight?
While you weren't sleeping, your body cooked up a perfect recipe for weight gain.
When you’re short on sleep you might be tempted to skip exercise (too tired), get takeout for dinner, and then turn in late because you’re uncomfortably full.
If this cascade of events happens a few times each year, no problem.
Trouble is, more than a third of Americans aren't getting enough sleep, regularly impacting our metabolism and causing us to hang on to that pesky fat.
You see, sleep is like nutrition for the brain.
Too little sleep triggers a cortisol spike. This stress hormone signals your body to conserve energy to fuel your waking hours.
Translation: You’re more apt to hang on to fat.
Researchers found that when dieters cut back on sleep over 14 days, the amount of weight they lost from fat dropped by 55%, even though their calories stayed equal. They felt hungrier and less satisfied after meals, and their energy was zapped.
Sleep deprivation makes you “metabolically groggy," University of Chicago researchers say. Within just 4 days of insufficient ZZZs, your body’s ability to process insulin -- a hormone needed to change sugar, starches, and other food into energy -- goes awry. Insulin sensitivity, the researchers found, dropped by more than 30%.
Here’s why that’s bad: When your body doesn't respond properly to insulin, your body has trouble processing fats from your bloodstream, so it ends up storing them as fat.
So it’s not so much that if you sleep, you’ll lose weight, but that too little sleep hampers your metabolism and contributes to weight gain.
So what can we do to improve our sleep?
The basics are pretty simple:
- Take a warm bath with Epsom Salts
- Shut down your computer, cell phone, and TV at least an hour before you hit the sack.
- Save your bedroom for sleep and sex. Think relaxation and release, rather than work or entertainment.
- Create a bedtime ritual. It's not the time to tackle big issues. Instead, take a warm bath, meditate, or read.
- Stick to a schedule, waking up and retiring at the same times every day, even on weekends.
- Watch what and when you eat. Avoid eating heavy meals and alcohol close to bedtime, which may cause heartburn and make it hard to fall asleep. And steer clear of soda, tea, coffee, and chocolate after 2 p.m. Caffeine can stay in your system for 5 to 6 hours.
- Turn out the lights. Darkness cues your body to release the natural sleep hormone melatonin, while light suppresses it.