What Sleep Has to Do with Weight Loss

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Up until recently we used to admire people who claimed they needed very little sleep. There was even a view that a need for little sleep was related to higher intelligence!

But now we know that a lack of sufficient sleep is one of the main causes of overweight, as well as mental and physical illness.

In fact a lack of sufficient sleep is now being seen as a modern disease, creating stress, compromising the body's ability to regenerate, and even lowering our basic metabolic rate. Our metabolic rate plays a crucial role in weight loss and is every bit as important as the amount of food that we eat, and the amount of activity we have.

Have you heard the silly line from the diet companies that weight loss requires you to calculate the energy from the food you eat, and then deduct the energy from your activity output? If this advice weren't so pointless and dangerous, it'd be laughable. There is a far more important factor, and that's your resting metabolic rate.

Although there are an array of lifestyle factors that also affect metabolism and therefore affect weight loss, sleep is one of the most important, is crucial to your weight loss program, and crucial for permanent weight loss. Everyone has slightly different sleep needs, but most adults need between 7 and 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, while children (including older teenagers, no matter how loudly they protest) need more like 12 or 13.

If you also suffer from a serious illness, like depression for example, quality sleep becomes even more important in your journey toward recovery.

9 Tips to a Better Night's Sleep

1 Protect your sleep time. Don't allow the expectations of others to detract from your sleep. If you need to go to bed early in order to get your sleep, do it. If you need to stop people from interrupting your sleep, do it.

If sleep interruption is beyond your control (for example if you have small children or a sick partner who needs care during the night) make sure you get extra sleep during the day, and also make sure you get some nights off.

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 each day, and having a regular "calm down" time in the hour before bed. This trains your brain to sleep much better.

3 About the slow down time before bed. This is a time when you want to avoid stimulation, whether that's from books or television, or from alcohol for example. This is a time for dimmed lighting, quiet music, and easy conversation.

4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they're plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you'll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.

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 ideal sleeping conditions.

6 Stay in Bed. Some sleep experts advise you to get up if you can't fall to sleep within 30 minutes, so that in your mind bed is linked only to sleeping. I find this rather silly, since bed can be linked to having sex, reading, resting, daydreaming, and even being ill. Instead I recommend staying in bed so that you train your mind that this is the correct place to be at this time.

There is quite good evidence for my recommendation to stay in your bed. For example if we're helping a new baby to get into a good sleep routine, one of the things we do is try to keep them in their cot and provide as little stimulation as possible even if we have to give an extra bottle or change a nappy. The last thing we'd do is pick them up and go and sit in a bright room with a television on. That'd be teaching them to wake up!

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 A physically active day is important to good sleep. If you don't get enough activity through the day, your body won't achieve the chemical state it requires to produce adequate melatonin, the "sleep hormone".

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.

Guest Author

There are 17 lifestyle factors which have a important impact on weight loss, so sleep is just one of them. Christine Sutherland's free book "17 Solutions" spells out each of them and tells you how to get them right! Available courtesy of the globally-launched Kind Communities Initiative.