Sleep My Pretty, Sleep.

13 Feb Sleep My Pretty, Sleep.

Quality SLEEP is important!  It can make you or break you the next day, not to mention those around you.

Believe it or not, quality sleep is crucial to helping you lose fat, and healing and repairing the body.

The ability to age well, level insulin resistance disorders, release toxins (autophagy), repair damages and heal, and lose body fat are created during your night’s sleep. This is where true ‘intermittent fasting’ occurs, IF you eat accordingly during the day time hours.

One night of bad sleep will put your body in an insulin resistant state for the entire next day. For most people who have excess weight on their frame, are in fact dealing with insulin issues and metabolic disorder.

The last meal of the day, what it is specifically, and more importantly WHEN it is consumed, will influence a wide variety of physiological processes, including your wake/sleep cycle, core body temperature, mental alertness, and possibly the likelihood of developing chronic diseases. So if you’re not sleeping great – FIX your food habits.

Your body, like a baby or toddler, needs structure in key areas like food consumption times and sleep.

If a child doesn’t get these things in structured timeframes it gets very cranky and causes stress to their body and they voice it in an undeniable way. Adults however, keeping pushing their body to the point of damaging it on a cellular level.

Poor sleep habits as you age can damage your heart (heart disease), cause metabolic disorders, depression, cravings and fat gains. That alone, as an adult, should help you pay more serious attention to your sleep habits.

Many of my clients set their phone alarms to train their body to eat on TIME and drink more water.

It is important to create new habits!

Waking up at the same time and going to bed at the same time is a noticeable way to help your body heal again. This ultimately will help you be more rested, productive and able to handle any obstacles in the day.

A good snooze helps you be more positive, productive, organized, healthy, and helps you release fat from your body. What’s not to love?!

Your body wants to be healthy and knows exactly how to be healthy.

When you’re exhausted, it’s easy to skip exercise, get takeout for dinner, eat too much and then be uncomfortably full at bedtime.

This crazy sleep pattern sets your brain up to make bad decisions the next day.

It dulls activity in the brain’s frontal lobe, the hub of decision-making and impulse control.

So it’s a little like being drunk. You don’t have the mental clarity to make good decisions. We’ll visit drinking too often later on… 😉

When you’re overtired, your brain’s reward centers rev up, looking for something that feels good. So while you might be able to squash comfort food cravings when you’re well-rested, your sleep-deprived brain may have trouble saying no to sweets, more food or alcohol.

When people are starved of sleep, meal portions increase as well as late-night snacking.

This will again, increase fat and weight gain, and cause inflammation in the body.

Sleep and Metabolism

Think of sleep as nutrition for the brain. Most people need between 7 and 9 hours each night. Get less than that, and your body will react in ways that lead even the most determined to make poor choices.

Too little sleep triggers a cortisol spike. This stress hormone signals your body to conserve energy to fuel your waking hours. Translation: You’re more apt to hang on to fat.

Sleep deprivation makes you “metabolically groggy,” One night’s of insufficient sleep makes your body’s ability to process insulin – a hormone needed to change sugar, starches, and other food into energy – go awry. Insulin sensitivity drops drastically.

Here’s why that’s bad: When your body doesn’t respond properly to insulin, your body has trouble processing fats from your bloodstream, so it ends up storing them as fat.

So it’s not so much that if you sleep, you’ll lose weight, but that too little sleep hampers your metabolism and contributes to weight gain. The proper timing of eating food is pertinent to helping the body rest, repair and release fat AT NIGHT when it’s supposed to.

Tricks and Tips for a Better Night’s Sleep

In today’s world sleep patterns are scattered due to all your screens (computers, TVs, cell phones, tablets) that lure you into staying up just a little longer and jangle all your melatonin production up for the night. It’s time to learn to put your pineal gland to bed!

The basics are pretty simple:

• Shut down your computer and cell phone at least two hours before you hit the sack. PUT IT AWAY and TURN IT OFF.
• Purchase a quality orange/red tinted lens blue blocker glasses if you are watching television at night before bed, but not IN BED.  Get that OUT of your sleep room.
• Dim lights, shut blinds (even in summer) where you are ending your night (family room)and let your body start producing melatonin at least 1.5 hours BEFORE you go up to bed.
•  Your body needs sunlight during the DAY to produce serotonin, and dim lighting in evenings to produce melatonin for healing and sleeping. My lights get dimmed and blinds closed by 7:30-8 p.m.
• Save your bedroom for sleep and sex. NO BOOBTUBE IN THE BEDROOM. 😊 Think relaxation and release. 😉
• Create a bedtime ritual. It’s not the time to tackle big issues. Instead, take a warm bath, meditate, or read an actual book.
• Stick to the schedule, waking up and going to bed at the same times every day, even on weekends as much as possible.
• Remember: like a little baby, YOUR ADULT BODY needs this structure to function healthfully.
• Watch what and when you eat. Eating too late will cause your body to be dealing with digestion during your sleep instead of healing, resting, repairing. You’ll wake up tired, stuffy and bloated if you eat too late. (Your last meal should be finished by 6 p.m. AND: NO FOOD after 6 p.m.!!! always strive for earlier) If you feed your system properly throughout your day, this is not an issue.  Ask my clients. They will tell you flat out they sleep AND FEEL BETTER the next day when they eat their last meal EARLY.  (and they lose fat due to proper fasting times, along with lowering cellular inflammation).

It’s what needs to be done to GET your health back, LOSE FAT, and age well!

• Those that push back on that usually stay in their misery of fat, sick, and tired.

Sleep is an important balancer of neuroendocrine function and glucose metabolism (brain and blood sugars) and sleep loss has been shown to result in metabolic and endocrine alterations, including decreased glucose tolerance, decreased insulin sensitivity, increased evening concentrations of cortisol, increased levels of ghrelin (a hunger hormone) decreased levels of leptin, and increased hunger and appetite.

Sleep restriction also is associated with salt retention and inflammatory markers. Inflammation in the cellular/blood levels leads to all illnesses and diseases.

Again, the body knows how to be healthy. Stop jamming it’s joy channels. 😉

Sleep plays many roles and is involved in most regulatory systems in the body. This includes everything from how cells transport glucose to manage energy, to how the immune system recognizes tissue for repair.

REMEMEBER: Don’t be productive in your bedroom. Your bedroom should be devoted to rest and relaxation, sheltered from busy-ness. (in other words, NO tv, no computers, no cell phones)

I take my eating times and sleep/wake up times seriously for my personal health and well-being.

Sleep is NOT a decadence. To have a healthy and productive life, it’s a must-have, on par with eating well and working out every day. The more you can practice healthy sleep habits throughout your life, the less you’re likely to develop these types of sleep disorders and serious health issues. Bonus, you’ll age gloriously!

Now, let’s talk about booze. For heaven’s sake: LAY OFF THE BOOZE Sunday-Thursday! It’s well known that it messes up your sleep.

Do this especially if you truly want to lose body fat, lose the bloated look, look less old, have great sleep and a happy, healthy, positive mindset throughout your next day.

Life is only difficult if you are the cause of messing it up due to bad habits and choices. These things can be changed. Take responsibility and control of your life and health.

To calmly handle the ups and downs in life you need structured sleep schedules and proper eating throughout the day time hours. It ain’t rocket science as they say.

You can’t claim to be a victor if always claiming victimhood. FIGHT FOR YOUR HEALTHY LIFE AND BODY YOU WANT. FIGHT FOR IT! Work at it! No one else will.

Now…. Sleep my pretty, sleep.