Sleep yourself thin

It’s a little known fact that lack of sleep can actually affect your weight. During the winter months, if you don’t get the full nine hours sleep a night, even if you diet and exercise, you may still be inadvertently preventing yourself from being the size you’d like to be.Getting the right amount of sleep has a fundamental effect on weight management. This is especially relevant for women who store body fat around their middle. Carrying weight in this area is a sign that the effects of the hormones cortisol and insulin are interfering with your ability to keep your body fat down. The understanding of how to achieve efficient fat-loss has moved on from just calories in versus calories out; or eat less and train more. Long-term weight management involves a deeper understanding of what encourages the body to store fat. Sleeping more may just be the missing link.In 1910 we slept an average of 9-10 hours. This has now gone down to below seven. And it’s no coincidence that waistlines have ballooned since then. Most of us are aware that training, correct nutrition and eliminating alcohol is vital for weight loss, but sleeping more? This is a tougher sell, and modern lifestyles make it a testing concept to stick to. If you have trouble sleeping for nine hours a night, read my top five tips in order to sleep as much as possible, without getting sacked or divorced!

Evening Rest

The first step is an easy one; turn the lights down at 8pm, then off at 10pm and aim to be asleep by 10.30pm. Darkness in the evening is vital for the healthy functioning of the adrenals, the gland which produces our stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is spiked by the morning sun, and then tapers off as we unwind throughout the day and the light changes to darkness. The gradual dim of the evening should allow the adrenals to rest. But the invention of the light bulb has filled our evenings with light. We now live a 24-hour existence and our bodies can’t live by the natural circadian rhythms of day and night, vital for both health and weight. This isn’t to say cortisol is all bad; it is essential for our survival. A lion appears; we need cortisol to flee. Likewise, we require an energy surge to train. Survival wise, fleeing a hungry lion is obviously vital. The problem is, the human body doesn’t differentiate between different types of stress in all its forms. Hungry lion? Or working late to meet a deadline? Your boss won’t literally eat you for breakfast if you don’t meet a work deadline, but your stress levels will feel exactly the same.As it’s light when it’s meant to be dark, we are wide awake when we are programmed to be asleep. And the difference today is, unlike lions, these modern stressors don’t go away. Constant stress response equals high cortisol levels all day. And this will affect your ability to lose weight, however much training and dieting you do.

Exercise earlier

Are you feeling stressed? If so, try training before 4pm. Exercise is vital for a healthy cortisol rhythm, but the timing and type of training needs to be considered. If you have issues with stress, doing high intensity resistance training or cardio late in the evening is not always beneficial. High intensity workouts cause a cortisol spike and an evening rush can be counter-productive. If you can’t train early, and you are under stress, try to stick to strength training, yoga, or tai chi in the evening.

Avoid caffeine

Don’t drink coffee, or if complete abstinence is too challenging for you, avoid it after midday. Caffeine late in the day messes with healthy cortisol production and affects your sleep.

Switch everything off

Turn off the TV and your laptop at 8pm. This might be tough at first, so try starting an hour earlier than you do now. Electric lights and televisions have brought light to evening darkness all year round, which has also made us fatter. During human evolution, the late evening sun communicated to our bodies that it’s summertime. The solar message: feast now as winter and famine are coming. Get fat now to survive. And nature has programmed us with a hugely efficient way of doing this, by telling us to eat carbohydrates! So we increase production of the storage hormone insulin, which enables us to store calories as body fat. In short, we crave carbs when the lights stay on. By bringing all year round light to darkness, and abolishing winter, we now crave carbs all year round. Think about it, do you crave sweet or fattening foods late at night? Often when you’re tired? This is your body telling you to store fat for the onset of winter.Throughout human evolution, fruit and vegetables were only there to be foraged in the summer. The advent of agriculture now equals an endless supply of carbs. Our ability to constantly react to the ‘fake’ solar messages and feast on carbohydrate is now at an all-time high. We’re programmed to eat filling food if the lights stay on, and we now stay up late, all year round. So maybe it’s not just Ben & Jerry’s fault for causing the explosion of insulin problems, obesity and ultimately type II diabetes. The over-consumption of sugars is, in survival terms, instinct. Maybe the blame should also fall with Faraday and Edison for inventing electricity generators, and Logie-Baird for bringing us television. Electricity in all its forms programmes us to crave sugar all year round.

Black out

Make sure your bedroom is dark. And this includes the little red power buttons on TVs, computers and boilers. Even these speak to you during the night and affect sleep patterns. If you still have problems sleeping, try taking a magnesium supplement. It is proven to help detoxify cortisol and calms the central nervous system, enabling good quality sleep. Sleeping more will benefit you; it will make you leaner, and the dress size you’ve always wanted to be! In the summer eight hours sleep is enough, but we should follow our natural circadian patterns and should aim to sleep for nine hours in the winter. So what more excuses do you need? Get to bed ladies! You’ll look all the better for it in the morning.

---

Top five tips to improve quantity and quality of sleep

• Turn off TVs, laptops and bright lights as early as possible. Aim for 8pm, but start off with an hour earlier than you usually do.
• Avoid coffee and any other stimulants after midday.
• Train in the mornings, or at least before 4pm. Adhere to healthy cortisol rhythms, as evenings are the time to unwind and relax.
• Make sure your room is dark and quiet. Install blackout blinds and turn off all electrical equipment (even those little red lights have an effect, so try sticking tape over them).
• Supplement with magnesium.