What Sleep Has to Do with Weight Loss
Up until recently we used to admire people who claimed they needed very little sleep. There was even a view that a need for little sleep was related to higher intelligence!
Modern scientific research shows that not only were those “sleep rejectors” behaving unintelligently and producing lower-grade, lower levels of work, but they were setting themselves up for serious mental and physical disease.
Regardless of whether sleep dysfunction is self-inflicted or foisted on us by circumstance, the end result is the same. We suffer because all of the body’s systems are compromised, including our all-important metabolic rate. And it’s our metabolism that is the number 1 factor in whether or not we lose weight, and then keep it off.
Have you heard the silly line from the diet companies that weight loss requires you to calculate the energy from the food you eat, and then deduct the energy from your activity output? If this advice weren’t so pointless and dangerous, it’d be laughable. There is a far more important factor, and that’s your resting metabolic rate.
Because the quality of your sleep has such a big impact on weight loss, quality sleep is an essential part of any weight loss program, although the actual amount varies from one individual to another. Most adults need at least 7.5-8.0 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. Children and teenagers require much more - around 12-13 hours of sleep each night.
When it comes to recovery from serious illness, quality sleep becomes even more important.
9 Ways to Improve Your Sleep
1 Protect your sleep time. Don’t allow the expectations of others to detract from your sleep. If you need to go to bed early in order to get your sleep, do it. If you need to stop people from interrupting your sleep, do it.
Sometimes our family responsibilities mean that our sleep is necessarily interrupted and every parent is very familiar with that! But make sure you catch up the next day, and that at least on some nights someone else takes turns being the “nightwalker”.
2 Routine is the friend of good sleep. When we have a regular routine for most days, we’re actually training our brain to shut down really efficiently each night, especially if we schedule in a “slowing down” time each night before bed.
3 About the slow down time before bed. This is a time when you want to avoid stimulation, whether that’s from books or television, or from alcohol for example. This is a time for dimmed lighting, quiet music, and easy conversation.
4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they’re plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you’ll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.
5 Is your bedroom actually conducive to good sleep? Is it quiet? Is it dark enough? Is there fresh air? Are your pillows, bed, and coverings, all comfortable and cosy? Do you feel safe and secure?
6 Don’t get up once you’ve gone to bed except for good reason. I’ve heard experts tell insomniacs not to stay in bed if they can’t sleep because they’ll end up associating their bed with their sleeping difficulties. Really this is rather illogical because bed is already associated with lots of things apart from sleep! My own advice is to stay in bed if it’s an appropriate sleep time in order to train your brain that this time of night means bed!
I claim that there’s obvious and unarguable evidence for my recommendation on this point, and you’ll see that for yourself immediately you think of the situation of training a baby or child into a good sleep routine. What would happen if each time the child struggled to go to sleep, you took the child out of bed and read him/her a book? Would that be a smart thing to do? No, didn’t think so!
So stay in bed, and use one of many proven relaxation techniques so that if you’re not sleeping, you’re at least training yourself to maintain a relaxed state - you’re at least “resting”.
7 Be Active During the Day. A good level of physical activity is essential to good sleep.
8 Ensure you have great relationships with others: family, friends, colleagues, your neighbourhood. Quality relationships are essential to our wellbeing and we sleep so much better when our relationships are in a good state.
9 Enjoy a good, healthy diet with lots of variety. If you eat well your body is easily able to produce the hormones required for good sleep. Avoid fad diets like the extreme low-carb diet for example, because this robs the body of the ability to produce adequate melatonin (and also causes depression!).
By: Christine Sutherland
Source: http://menshealthtoday.com