Weight Loss Strategies- Sleep

How many hours of sleep do you get a night? What time do you go to bed? Is a 7 hour night good enough for you? Is midnight-7am the equivalent sleep as 10:30pm-5:30am?

Most of us are busy enough that in order to fit in enough time for work, family and play, it seems necessary to shave a few hours off of things like sleep. But if you're interested in losing weight, this is exactly the wrong thing to do.

While the physiological processes that occur during sleep are still being heavily researched, the benefits are well known. Most chronic disease risks increase when you are chronically sleep deprived. Check out this great article from Harvard University's Division of Sleep Medicine that outlines the risks of sleep deprivation.

Let's put this into perspective. Have you ever heard people say, "that person is so skinny... she has such a fast metabolism!" Or just the opposite, "He doesn't eat that much... he must just have a slow metabolism."

Chronic sleep loss will change your metabolism. It will change the way your ...
- body handles sugar
- brain works in response to chemical cues
- insulin behaves in your body
- fats are managed by your body
- stress response is modulated through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA)
- ... and much much more

If you think about this, you'll see that even if only 1 of these changes occurred, your risk of weight gain would go up. We could spend all day just talking about how poor insulin responses will make you fat. But if you stack on just the 5 things I've listed here and you've got a quintuple threat to your weight loss goals.

Go to sleep.