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3338: Benefits of Sleep for Weight Loss and Other Fitness Goals by Rachel Trotta on Health, Fitness, and Mindful Living
00:10:25
Rachel Trotta explores how quality sleep is an often-overlooked pillar of sustainable weight loss
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This.
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Episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more@amazonbusiness.com welcome back to our Sunday bonus episode where I share an article with you from a different podcast in our network to keep your life nice and optimized. Today's episode is coming from Optimal Health Daily. You can find that show wherever you're listening to this and please do follow or subscribe to the show to get new episodes every day. And with that, here's Dr. Neal with the post and commentary as we optimize your life.
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The Benefits of Sleep for Weight Loss and Other Fitness Goals By Rachel Trotta of Racheltrada.com what are the benefits of sleep for fat loss and muscle gain? Listen on to find out the top five reasons to get your zzz when you're working towards your fitness goals. 1. Sufficient sleep helps your body to balance hunger hormones. The hormone ghrelin signals your body to eat more and unsurprisingly, your body makes more of this hormone when you're sleep deprived. Leptin tells your body it's had enough food and you guessed it, your body makes less leptin when you're tired. Insufficient sleep, in other words, causes you to battle stronger food cravings. And let's be honest, who needs that? 2. You get stressed when you undersleep, which causes you to store fat. Your body produces a hormone called cortisol when you experience the stress of uneven or insufficient sleep. And cortisol makes you more likely to store calories as fat no matter how well you are eating. In other words, a messed up sleep schedule can cause your body to treat a healthy diet like an unhealthy one. 3. Obviously, you have more energy when you are well rested. If you are exhausted, which do you think you'll be more likely to do? Hit the gym for a quick 20 minute run and then cook a healthy dinner or head straight home after work and order takeout. This seems like a no brainer, but sufficient sleep combined with a healthy diet will boost your energy throughout the day so that you don't experience an afternoon slump. 4. Sufficient sleep promotes mental and emotional health, which trickles down to our food and exercise habits. Going to bed and waking up at the same time every night and every morning is more than about waking up refreshed. Having a consistent sleeping schedule also improves mental and emotional well being and outlook. A positive attitude and healthy decision making leads to better choices all day long, including exercise and healthy eating. And 5. Sleeping is when your body recharges, heals and recovers. If you're working out and not getting enough sleep, you're not going to see the gains. You want the micro tears in your muscles or will not have the resources to heal and you'll be more prone to plateau or even worse injury. What are the worst enemies of a good sleeping schedule? What habits do you need to change? Alcohol Many tout a glass of wine or beer to be an effective sleep aid in their evening routine. However, this is largely imaginary. The reality is that drinking alcohol of any kind before bed allows you to fall asleep faster, but significantly decreases the quality and restfulness of your sleep. Caffeine if you are drinking any kind of caffeinated power drink, stop. If you simply drink coffee or caffeinated tea, you may want to think about how it affects your body and possibly stop drinking caffeine by 4pm screens LED screens activate the part of your brain that promotes wakefulness and alertness. As bedtime approaches, decrease your use of phone, tablet and computer screens. Try not to use them at all in the hour before bedtime. This may be very difficult if you live alone and technology is your connection to community at night, but the key is to create relaxing routines that are screen free, such as yoga, reading a book, a hot bath, etc. Now it may sound overly idyllic, but it is very effective. Weekend sleep binges. There is no sleep bank to which you can make deposits if you oversleep on the weekends to make up for lost sleep during the week, all you're doing is messing up your circadian rhythms even more. You'll be more tired on Monday, not refreshed. The best thing you can do for yourself is maintain your sleep routine within an hour on weekends. A busy bedroom. Your bedroom should be a haven of sleep, not an additional living area of your house or apartment. Keep the bedroom quiet, contained and screen free, yes, even from televisions, and only get into bed to sleep or have. Even if you have a studio apartment, as many of my friends do, you can set up the bedroom side of your apartment to be tranquil by facing it away from the media or by blocking it off with a huge bookshelf. It's more than feng Shui magic. Keeping your bedroom sacred creates a psychological and physiological cue for relaxation and sleep perfectionism. No one sleeps in exactly the same way. For some people, it's very common to wake up in the middle of the night. Other people can't sleep eight hours at a stretch and need to nap daily. Age, as well as the age of your children is a factor to consider in creating good sleeping habits. The key is to get consistent and work with your own quirks and know that your child won't be six months old forever. You can get sufficient sleep and reap the benefits of a consistent sleep cycle, but I must add a disclaimer for some people, it takes time to see results, sometimes weeks or more. Trust the process, be patient with yourself and keep following these tips until you begin to enjoy better sleep. Final Consideration if you are about to make a major life scheduling change, such as changing your work schedule from starting at 10am to starting at 6am, you need to treat the upcoming change exactly like like jet lag. The rule of jet lag is one hour per day, meaning that each day you should shift your sleeping and waking by one hour in the direction of your new schedule. This will prevent actual jet lag from happening for your entire first week on your new schedule. Smooth transitions are key when it comes to a healthy sleeping schedule. You just listened to the post titled Benefits of Sleep for Weight Loss and Other Fitness Goals by Rachel Trotta of racheltrada.com Imagine you're a business owner who.
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Dr. Neal here for my commentary. So how much sleep do we actually need each night? Well, for most of us, the goal should be seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. But as Rachel mentioned, some of us sleep differently. For some of us, waking up in the middle of the night is fairly normal. But when we look at the research, we're finding that uninterrupted sleep for at least seven hours a night seems to be perfect. This allows us to go in and out of that deep restorative or restful sleep, that deep REM sleep that we need so badly. And Rachel's right. When we achieve that deep restful sleep, it changes how our body not only responds to exercise, but how we process our calories. It changes our metabolism. And I even liked she mentioned that it affects our willpower. When we're feeling exhausted, that means our willpower is probably exhausted too, which means we're less likely to make healthy decisions. Think about it. The last time you were exhausted, how easy was it to imagine yourself standing in the kitchen and preparing a meal from scratch? It was probably the last thing you wanted to do. Instead, the couch and Netflix were like the siren songs. But here's the deal. If you stress about your sleep, it's going to backfire because then you're going to be sitting up in bed worrying that you're not falling asleep, which is then going to stress you out more, which may interrupt your sleep and it becomes this vicious cycle. So instead, maybe just try one of these ideas and as Rachel mentioned, give it some time. If after you've tried one of these ideas and you've given it a real shot, then try the next one. And again, be patient with yourself. Give yourself time to adjust. And this is coming from me, who was never what I would consider a morning person, but now regularly gets up at 5:40 in the morning to get ready to get to work. So if I can do it, you can too. Alright, that does it from me for today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you back here on tomorrow's show where your optimal life awaits.