How Important Is Sleep For Fat Loss, Mental Health, and Immunity? (and how to fix yours)
No one is getting enough sleep! Research shows that most adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night on average to be fully rested and recovered. As a society we are getting less and less sleep on average, and rates of obesity are out of control. Is sleep to blame?
We can’t pin all of the blame on a lack of zzz’s, but we know that it’s not helping!
So why aren’t we sleeping enough? Why do some of us wear a lack of sleep as a badge of honor? We all know that person who claims to be crushing life on 5 hours of sleep because they’re so busy.
I bet if we dug into many of these cases we’d find that there are 2-3 hours of unnecessary “screen time” per day that could easily be limited/eliminated and used for other responsibilities that would lead to more sleep most nights.
Surely I can’t be the only one that shakes their head in disbelief when that “screen time summary” pops up on their phone each week.
I get it though. Sometimes “me” time is hard to come by, and taking a couple of hours at the end of the night to veg out and catch up on IG stories, or a Netflix series seems like a good idea, even when you could easily turn off the screen and fall asleep.
What’s the big deal? It’s only an hour or two per night. I mean, we have coffee for those bleary-eyed mornings right?
Well if one of your goals to improve your health is to lose fat, those hours that you’re swapping scrolling for sleeping are almost assuredly setting you back. Maybe even setting you back as much as 55%!
Let’s talk today about:
Why we sleep in the first place & how much we need
What happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep
How decreased sleep affects fat loss
Ways to get to bed earlier
Ways to sleep better
WHY WE SLEEP
Sounds like a pretty simple thing that doesn’t need much further explanation right? Not so fast. I bet there’s more to it than you’re thinking about.
Our bodies have evolved to operate in a daily cycle, or rhythm. For the most part, we operate in a circadian rhythm based on the cycle of light and dark during the day. When we follow this rhythm, we’re at our best. We’re awake, we’re recovered and everything is coming up rainbows and unicorns. Ever work shift work or know someone who has? Talk about a stress on the body!
To understand why not getting enough sleep, and working against our natural sleep rhythms is so hard on our bodies we need to look at what happens while we’re sleeping in the first place.
For starters, don’t think for a minute that “nothing” is happening. In fact, a whole host of processes are happening in different stages of sleep. We go through 5 stages of sleep multiple times per night. When we get enough sleep, we spend about half of the time asleep in stage 2 sleep. During stage 2 our breathing slows, our blood pressure and resting heart rate slows, and our body temperature lowers slightly. This gives our heart and vascular system a well-deserved rest.
In stage 3 sleep (our deepest sleep) our brain waves slow, our blood pressure and breathing slow even more, and restoration of damaged cells and tissues are taken care of. We secrete powerful restorative hormones like human growth hormone during stage 3 as well. We spend about 20% of the night in stage 3 sleep. This is also when sleep-walking can take place 🙂
Think of sleep like plugging your phone into the charger every night. Your phone rests, and the power from the outlet restores the battery to give you another full day of use the next day.
So how much sleep do we really need? The consensus amongst researchers is that most adults over the age of 24 function best when they get between 7 and 8 hours on average per night. 6 to 7 hours would be the be minimum, and most people will see negative side effects with this amount of sleep on a regular basis. More on that later.
WHAT HAPPENS IF WE DON’T GET ENOUGH SLEEP?
We’ve all had a bad night of sleep. You lie there worried about something, staring at the clock as the minutes pass like hours. You wake up the next morning, drink extra coffee and slog through the day.
But what’s really going on when we chronically under sleep?
For starters, we’re not as mentally sharp. Our brains have a “waste flushing” system called the glymphatic system that operates at a higher rate while we’re asleep. Dumping all of the unnecessary clutter from our brain is essential to keeping us sharp. A fatigued brain is also a liability when it comes to things like driving and operating tools. Over 6,000 people in the U.S. die per year from crashes caused by drowsy driving. Not good.
The ability to memorize and recall data can be affected by chronic sleep deprivation as well as increased risk of developing depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders due to hormonal disruption.
Don’t sleep enough for long enough and you’ll also put a damper on your body’s immune system. This unnecessarily puts you at greater risk for everything from the common cold to cancer.
Not good things friends. Especially these days.
HOW DOES DECREASED SLEEP DERAIL FAT LOSS?
Remember how we mentioned that during stage 3 sleep our bodies release important hormones? Unfortunately one of the consequences of sleep deprivation falls squarely on the hormones that affect our hunger. These are Ghrelin and Leptin. Ghrelin stimulates hunger, and Leptin signals us that we’re full and should stop eating.
Well as you might have guessed, in periods of deprived sleep, ghrelin levels are elevated, and leptin levels are suppressed. This could be the smoking gun as far as why we crave junk food and generally have the munchies when aren’t rested and are stressed. In fact, studies show that if you get 5 or less hours of sleep per night you’re at a 50% greater risk of being obese. A BMI of over 30 is considered obese. You can calculate your BMI HERE.
A very interesting (but limited) 2010 study at the University of Chicago took 10 overweight/obese subjects and ran them each through two 14 day experiments. During each 14 days they were placed in a 10% calorie deficit. During one of the 14 day periods they slept an average of 5.25 hours per night, and during the other 14 day period they slept an average of 7.5 hours per night.
During each 14 day period the subjects lost an average of 6.6 pounds because of the calorie restriction.
Here’s the wild part. During the period of 7.5 hours of sleep per night, the participants lost 3.1 pounds of fat and 3.3 pounds of lean mass. During the period of restricted sleep, the participants lost 1.3 pounds of fat and 5.3 pounds of lean mass.
Keep in mind, these study participants didn’t have access to extra calories during each period. So although this was a short experiment on a small group, it is VERY interesting. I’m not interested in losing any lean mass (muscle) and I sure don’t want my clients losing it while we help them lose fat either!
Knowing the effects of ghrelin and leptin on hunger, I can only imagine if the participants had had access to extra food during the sleep-deprived period. #munchies
I’m excited for future research on larger samples sizes to see if this result repeats itself. I’m confident now recommending that if your goal is fat loss, and maintenance of muscle mass, getting adequate sleep is VERY important.
HOW TO GET MORE SLEEP
I hope I have you convinced that getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night is pretty darned important for your overall health and well-being. Not to mention that not shorting yourself on sack time can help you in your efforts to lose fat if that’s your goal.
So what are some practical ways to get more sleep? First off, let’s start with the obvious one that people often overlook. YOU NEED TO GO TO BED EARLIER! Let’s get practical here. For this to work, you have to decide that this is what you want to do and that you’re willing to put in some work to do it. If you aren’t there yet, I get it, but let’s be honest with ourselves.
Tip 1: Make lists earlier in the day. Each morning, make a list of what you need to get done. Having it written down will make it MUCH more likely that your tasks are done, and that you don’t remember them 30 minutes before bed! Be sure and check out our post about setting up morning and evening routines HERE.
Tip 2: Set yourself a curfew. Most of us need to be up and going by a certain, inflexible time each morning. That means if we’re going to increase our sleep time it needs to come by going to bed earlier. Take your wake up time, subtract 8 hours and that’s your new curfew. Be tough on yourself to be IN BED by curfew if not a few minutes earlier.
Tip 3: Set an alarm or reminder on your phone 1 hour before your curfew to remind you that bedtime is coming. After you silence the alarm, turn off your phone and get started on your pre-bed rituals (more on that later).
Tip 4: Tell someone your plan and give them permission to hold you accountable. It can be a spouse, roommate or a friend. Set up a check-in schedule with them so they can speak some truth to you if you’re not holding up your end of the bargain!
Ok now you’re getting IN bed sooner, how about sleep quality?
HOW TO GET BETTER SLEEP
Quality of sleep matters, not just the quantity. If you’re taking powerful sleeping pills that are essentially making you unconscious, or drinking so much chardonnay that you pass out, that’s not the same as getting restorative sleep.
Practical ways to improve your sleep quality:
Tip 1: Buy bedding and sleeping clothes that you like. If you love your sheets and your bed feels all kinds of cozy, there’s a better chance you’ll look forward to getting into bed and sleep better once you’re there.
Tip 2: Don’t drink caffeine after 2:00PM. Sorry, no late day Coffee, Monster, Red Bull, or BANG energy drinks if we’re prioritizing sleep. Caffeine stimulates our nervous systems and can make it difficult to down-regulate as we approach bedtime.
Tip 3: Pay attention to light. Remember those natural rhythms? We sleep our best when we’re exposed to a lot light during the day and a lot of darkness at night. Get outside a few times per day even if you have a desk job. Then at night, put your devices in dark mode to limit the amount of sleep-disrupting blue light that you’re exposed to. There are even special glasses that you wear as bedtime approaches to help filter out blue light from TV’s, phones and computers. If your bedroom doesn’t get dark at night, get some black-out curtains for your windows and make sure things like alarm clocks and other devices are not creating extra light. We use an alarm clock that’s very dim and wakes us up with a gradually increasing light.
Tip 4: Stick to a schedule. Go to bed and wake up as close to the same times each day that you can realistically. Research shows that this is the best way to get a truly restful night of sleep.
Tip 5: Start winding down about an hour before bed. To get the best night’s sleep you want to start to slow down long before you climb into bed. Turn off bright overhead lights, take a relaxing shower or bath, diffuse some oils, read a relaxing book, and have a cup of hot tea. If you’re going to bed while you’re still amped up there’s a good chance you’ll lie there awake longer, and get less restful sleep than if you had started unwinding sooner.
Look, I get it. It’s not sexy to think about getting better sleep. It’s easier to focus on more “active” things we can do to improve our lives.
Things like lifting more weights, eating better, and finding “hacks” to make life easier. The funny thing is that all of those things are actually automatically improved when we do get more (and better) sleep. Like everything, we recommend taking a gradual approach to trying to make improvements vs. changing everything all at once. It just works better.
So if you’re in that 4-6 hour of sleep per night group, look at your routines and pick a couple of the things we’ve talked about here today to start implementing.
Once they’re a habit, pick a couple more. Our hope is that you eventually get a more appropriate amount of sleep that keeps you feeling and operating at maximum capacity.
Thanks for reading!
If you’d like to work 1-on-1 with us on these changes and more, let’s talk. Apply for coaching HERE.