How Sleep Can Help Weight Loss
Sep 1st, 2007 | By Rebbekah | Category: Beauty Tips, Weight LossHave you been struggling to lose weight? Have you tried diet, exercise, and even weight loss pills, but nothing seems to be doing the trick? The trouble may not be with the things you’re doing while you’re awake, but rather the simple fact that you are awake. Studies have shown that getting more sleep and better quality sleep can help you shed pounds without expensive fad diets. So if you really want to get rid of those excess pounds once and for all, why not spend less time counting calories and more time in bed?
The first reason that sleeping more causes you to lose less weight is probably the most obvious. The more hours you spend sleeping, the fewer hours you have to eat. We all have cravings for certain foods that aren’t good for us, and the longer we’re awake, the longer we have to fight those cravings. Plus, sleep deprivation reduces deductive reasoning skills, so we have less will power to resist.
Getting a good night’s rest makes you feel energized and awake the next day. If you sleep well the night before, you’re more likely to be able to get up and go work out. Sufficient sleep can give you the energy to work out harder and for longer periods of time, further fueling your weight loss efforts.
We used to believe that you we hungry when your stomach was empty and full when your stomach had no room left, but we know better than that now. We now know more about hormones and other chemicals in the body and how they affect hunger. One of these chemicals is cortisol. Excess cortisol not only causes us to feel hungry when we’ve had enough to eat; it can also affect the amount of fat we store. On top of this, cortisol decreases memory retention along with other stress inducing side effects. Getting sufficient sleep helps return the cortisol balance to normal.
Two other chemicals that have recently been shown to be affected by the amount of sleep your get are the hormones leptin, which makes you feel hungry, and ghrelin, which makes you feel full. Reduced amounts of sleep can reduce ghrelin levels and increase leptin levels, causing you to feel you need to eat more when you’ve actually had enough.
Another side effect of sleep deprivation is a change in the way the body metabolizes carbohydrates. Most individuals have problems fully digesting carbs without sufficient sleep. This means that instead of being burned for energy; these calories are being stored as fat. Plus, excess carbs in your system can cause a rise in blood sugar levels, along with insulin resistance; these are both symptoms of type II diabetes.
And if all these reasons aren’t good enough for you, lack of sleep also drops the level of human growth hormone in your system. While HGH helps children grow bigger, it affects the percentage of fat in proportion to muscle in adults. Decreased levels of this hormone send even more of the food you eat to be stored as fat reserves, further hindering your weight loss.
So if you’re really serious about losing weight, make it a goal to get a full night’s sleep every night. You’ll likely start seeing those pounds fly off in no time.
[...] How Sleep can help Weight Loss [...]
The funny thing about diets and weightloss plans are their are so many and all do not work for everyone. The thing that you have to do is to keep trying different plans until you find the one that gets you the results you are looking for.
The most important thing is to keep on trying and you will find it.
If you check out enough diet sites you will find certain things that run through all of them and these generally are the things that you use to create your diet foundation.
I kept on searching until I found one that would allow me to eat whatever I wanted and still get in shape. I also shared this with some other people who thank me daily.
Keep trying and don’t stop!
Fat Butt No More’s last blog post..Not So Secret Secrets To Weight Loss But Often Overlooked
It is always a struggle to get the weight off and then it takes a conscious effort to keep it off.
Being over weight is an emotionally draining and physically draining situation to be in and many times your struggle is reduced to ridicule and insensitivity.
The exhilaration you feel when you look back 5 months before you made a conscious effort and see positive results is truly gratifying and often creates wide smiles and happy tears.
Losing weight can be accomplish but motivation must come from the inside to change the outside.
You can and will do it, just never give up hope.
Only give up the pounds and the inches.
Fat Butt No More
Fat Butt No More’s last blog post..My Wife Has A Beer Belly-My Husband Is Pregnant
I never knew that sleep helped so much. I figured that it would help heal muscles hurt from training and that it was good for you. But I didn’t know about the carb metabolizing effects. Thanks for the info.
Paunchiness’s last blog post..Seriously? Pumped Up