Lose Weight in Your Sleep!
SLEEP: A Healthy Way to Lose Weight!
We have all heard about how important sleep is to our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Here’s another tidbit to support adequate sleep. The connection between sleep and weight has long been known by the military. This knowledge is now seeping into the media world. To test the premise that lack of adequate sleep contributes to weight gain, Glamour magazine did an experiment. They recruited 10 women and told them not the change their diets or their exercise routine. They were given 3 rules:
1) They MUST get 7.5 hours of sleep a night
2) They couldn’t have any caffeine after 2:30 p.m.
3) They couldn’t drink any alcohol 3 hours before bed.
Ten weeks later, their average weight loss was between 6-15 pounds. This is in keeping with the findings of the military. The average weight loss was a half pound to two pounds a week.
It is thought that if you sleep 5 hours or less a night, you consume about 200 more calories a day. They attribute the increased calorie intake to a decrease in leptin, a hormone that helps control appetite. If you don’t get adequate sleep, leptin is decreased and your appetite increases. An increase of up to 71,200 extra calories a year can certainly add on extra pounds.
So, the question is… how are you sleeping? Are you sleeping less each night than you should, need an alarm clock to wake up, or having interrupted, unrefreshing sleep? Naturopathic medicine provides many different approaches to establishing healthy sleep. Consult your doctor and improve your health through sleep.
Sweet dreams!