Beauty Sleep

OHHHHH yes, sleep! We all seem to love it, but how many of us are actually getting enough z's nightly? You have probably heard enough times that sleep is important for you, all aspects of your health. It is not called beauty sleep nothing. However, do you know the importance of sleep for your waist line?

There are important connection between sleep and the amounts of what we eat and even the foods we eat. There is a pesky hormone called ghrelin. In recent times you might have heard about it, due to its importance for weight lose and our better understanding of this hormone. As a norm, you will hear ghrelin in combination with leptin, as they work together. A little about ghrelin, we will not get to deep into it, beyond the scope of this blog. Ghrelin is produced in the stomach. We have a higher production rate when we are hungry, an increase. When we are full, the levels drop. Leptin comes into play to help you full the fullness factor, or as we call it, satiety.

How sleep effects this. When we do not get enough sleep, our ghrelin levels are higher thus signaling to us that we are hungry. We eat. What we tend to eat is more sugar because it is instant energy for out body and causes greater weight gain. When we have gotten enough sleep, we have lower levels or ghrelin and thus eat less. When we eat less, we can lose weight or maintain, the name of the game.

Try an experiment for yourself to see how this will play out for you. After you have not had a good nights sleep, keep track of what you eat for the day. After several nights of little sleep, you will begin to see a pattern of being hungry and eating a lot of sugar and or carbs. Then try to get to bed earlier so you can get seven to eight hours of sleep. Again, keep track of what you eat over a period of several days. Then, compare what you have eaten from noting sleeping enough to sleeping enough. What you should find is you are eating less on days when you sleep well and are more rested.  After a few weeks of more sleep, you will begin to feel better, look better, and lose some weight.

Just a little trick in the fight against weight lose! It might seem simple, but remember, it is the simple things that usually work the best.
In the Love of Christ,
Jenn