You try to follow a high protein diet, you know which foods to limit, you consume plenty of water, you commit to 10,000 steps every day and you weight train 3-4 times a week, yet you have the tendency to struggle maintaining focus, controlling hunger and you crave sweets. Sound familiar?
Maybe it's genetics. Maybe you're lazy or lack willpower. Or maybe, diet or exercise isn't the real problem for you...
The most common advice you'll hear when it comes to fat loss is "oh, you just need to eat less and move more." But is it really that simple? We know how important diet and exercise are, that's not in doubt, but is a lack of sleep sabotaging your fat loss efforts? How much attention are you paying to your sleep duration and quality?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35 percent of the population are sleep deprived. When you consider that the statistic for obesity is nearly identical, it's easy to connect the dots and discover that the connection is not a coincidence.
So, how does sleep sabotage your fat loss effort?
Sleep deprivation has a wide-range of potential adverse side effects for your health. A lack of sleep can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, elevated blood pressure, and several inflammatory markers. These inflammatory factors promote immune system dysfunction and leave you more susceptible to illness, but I want to focus on the affects on fat loss that a lack of sleep creates.
Leptin Production
Leptin is a hormone involved in the regulation of appetite, metabolism and calorie burning. Leptin is essentially the chemical responsible for telling your brain that you're full (amongst other things).
As you sleep, levels of leptin increase, telling your brain that you have enough energy, when you don't get enough sleep these levels of leptin don't increase enough, which, through a series of complex processes makes your brain think you don't have enough energy for your daily needs, so your brain signals that you're hungry, despite the fact that you don't actually need food at that time.
The decreases in leptin brought on by sleep deprivation can result in constant feelings of hunger, causing you to overeat and when your body doesn't need the excess calories your brain is signalling for, it stores them as fat.
Ghrelin Production
Another hormone associated with sleep and fat gain is ghrelin. Simply put, ghrelin does the exact opposite of what leptin does, it tells your brain when you need to eat, when you should conserve energy and when you should store fat. As we sleep, levels of ghrelin begin to decrease, as sleep requires far less energy than when we're awake. When you don't sleep enough you'll end up with too much ghrelin in your system and again the brain will signal that your body needs more calories, guess where these calories are getting stored?
Exercise Performance
Finally, we can't overlook the connection between the amount/quality of sleep we get and our overall exercise performance. When you are short on sleep, it's common to find yourself struggling to maintain the usual level of performance that you would normally tolerate quite well. In addition to this, since sleep is the primary time the body recovers from exercise you're already going to be entering your next session at a disadvantage due to inadequate recovery.
As you can see, sleep plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of your diet and exercise regime and it isn't simply a case of "eat less, move more" when powerful hormones are misaligned.
If you're serious about losing body fat and improving your health you should be prioritising sleep.
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