Sleep and Weight Loss
This means that if you have been following a bad sleep routine, there are high chances that you are gaining more weight or your weight loss plan is not working as you've desired.
Sleep resets and regulates metabolism
Sleep actually resets our metabolic system and further affects the hunger hormones, stress hormones, and muscle building/fat burning hormones in our body. This means that sleep is the key factor in determining whether one can sustain continuous fat loss.
Less amount of sleep or irregular sleep affects your metabolism negatively, which in return affects your weight loss plan. Not just that, as you sleep the body produces its fat-burning-and-anti-aging hormones like HGH, glucagon, and testosterone. But if you don't get your regular sleep the production of these hormones is affected negatively, and so is your weight loss.
Our body also releases appetite regulating two key hormones ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin signals the body when to eat while leptin signals the body to when to put away the plate and stop eating. When we are sleep deprived, our body produces more ghrelin and less leptin, which leads us to eat more often. So, we end up eating more. In addition to this, this also slows down our metabolism process, which again means that you are heading to put on more weight.
Sleep quantity and quality matters
Experts suggest that our body requires about eight hours of sleep to maintain the basic hormonal balance. It's like when we sleep our body goes through its own restoring-and-regenerating system. This process takes its own time, and as per researches, it is said that eight hours of sleep is minimum required to refresh this hormonal-and-metabolic system. Similarly, the quality of sleep is also important as much as the quantity.
Keep a note of your sleeping and waking up time
Apart from ensure a better quantity and quality of your sleep, which affects your weight loss plan, it's important to keep a note of when you sleep and when you wake up. So, people who sleep by 10:00 or 11:00 pm, and take full 8-hour sleep, have better metabolism and hormonal system. While those who sleep at or past midnight, even if they sleep for eight hours, witnesses a poor metabolism and hormonal system restoration. This is because the hormonal system, which rebalances itself, works much better in the dark. And as the light starts to come up, its effectiveness slows down. So, even if we are sleeping at that time, we may not get best of the benefit out of it.
Simple tips to follow
- Don't skimp on sleep if you are on a weight loss plan.
- Sleep at least for eight hours.
- In order to ensure better quality sleep, avoid use of computers, laptops, phones, and other gadgets at least two hour before your sleep time.
- Eat your dinner by 7:00 pm so you can sleep early.
- Avoid eating too heavy dinner as it may disturb your sleep
- Follow the habit of 'early to bed and early to rise' (after your 8 hours of sleep) helps your body restore its hormonal system much effectively, and this surely helps one to lose weight. more