How Healthy Are You?

Why Good Sleep is Essential to Weight Loss

In the 80’s the ability to live with very little sleep was held up as some kind of badge of honour. The less sleep you needed, the more intelligent you were, and the more highly regarded you were.

But now the facts are clearly out, and we realise that a demand of enough calibre sleep is a prime cause of lowered metabolic rate, overweight, illness and disease.

Sleep deprivation, whether deliberate or unintended, can be considered a relatively modern disease, interfering with the normal operation of all of the body’s systems and especially interfering with our metabolism. It’s our metabolic rate that determines whether or not we get fat on the food we eat, or burn it up to run our bodies efficiently.

For instance many diet companies will tell you that weight loss is simple, just a matter of “energy in/energy out”. This is a particularly stupid lie, because the state of your metabolism is more important than either.

Because the calibre of your sleep has such a big impact on weight loss, calibre 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 apiece night. Children and teenagers require much more - around 12-13 hours of sleep apiece night.

Quality sleep is even more essential in the journey to recover from any illness, including depression.

9 Steps to Improve Sleep

1 Sleep time is as precious as the air you breathe, so guard it well. Who cares if the house is a mess! It’s far more important that every member of the family get their sleep time.

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 It’s important to have a regular routine for your day. This means pretty much going to bed and getting up the same time apiece day, and having a regular “calm down” time in the hour before bed. This trains your brain to sleep much better.

3 Getting calm before going to bed. This means avoiding things that are stimulating to your body or brain, like loud or stressful television or music, arguments, alkaloid or alcohol. Conversely you should use dimmed lighting, quiet background music, and laid-back conversation as a way to slow down and get ready for sleep.

4 Getting rid of stress from your life in general. When people suffer from repetitive thoughts at sleep time, with the mind turning over and over the same stuff, it’s generally because there’s an objectionable level of stress in their lives. No-one needs to place up with this, especially with the advent of Logotherapy and NeuroStim, two relatively new techniques (see TopLifeSolutions.com for more information on these).

5 Prepare Your Bedroom. Of course your bed and pillows etc should be comfortable! But in addition your room should be dark and on the cool side, with fresh air. Those are saint sleeping conditions.

6 If you should be sleeping, stay in your bed. I know that some “experts” tell people they shouldn’t stay in bed if they can’t sleep, but I really can’t agree. Their theory is that bed should only be associated with sleep, not with waking, but there are lots of things linked to bed that are no problem at all, like reading, having sex, resting, being unwell, or whatever. I say “stay there” because this will teach your brain that bed is the right place to be at this time of night.

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 apiece 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 You must be physically active during the day. Your body needs vigorous physical activity in order to properly produce sleep hormones. Mornings or primeval afternoons are the best times for you to play a sport, or go for that really brisk achievement or cycle ride.

8 Enjoy good relationships with everyone around you. If you have strained relationships, or adversarial relationships, this will detract from your sense of wellbeing and therefore will definitely impact on your sleep. Get your relationships in shape and you’ll enjoy much better sleep.

9 Enjoy good nutrition. In the end it’s the nutrients we take into our body that allow us to produce the hormones that allow good sleep.