Sleep Your Way to Weight Loss

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sleep for weight loss

Want to lose weight in your sleep?

Previously, we told you how important sleep is for your workout routine.

Sleep's equally important for weight loss. There's the obvious way: if you're tired, you're unlikely to make healthy decisions like getting your daily exercise or making healthy meals. But there are other ways that sleep affects weight loss that you might not know about. Keep reading to learn why you'll definitely want to get enough shut-eye tonight.

Sleep directly affects your metabolism

When your body is sleep-deprived, its cortisol production is elevated. Cortisol is the stress hormone that tells your body to conserve energy, so sleep deprivation encourages your body to store more fat.

Too little sleep also interferes with your body's ability to process insulin, the hormone your body uses to process carbs and sugar into energy. Again, this can force your body to store more fat.

Then there's your impulse control

Not getting a healthy amount of sleep can also sabotage your diet in another way: It can ruin your impulse control. Sleep regulates the production of two other important hormones, leptin and ghrelin. These two work in tandem to regulate our appetite. Ghrelin tells our bodies when it's time to eat, making us feel hungry. And leptin tells our bodies when it's time to stop, making us feel full. When we're sleep-deprived, our body produces too much ghrelin and not enough leptin. Combined with the sabotaged metabolism, having your impulse control jeopardized can trigger disastrous weight gain.

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Lack of sleep puts your muscles at risk

Lastly, when your body isn't getting enough sleep, it struggles to synthesize protein properly. Protein synthesis is an incredibly important part of your body's recovery cycle, especially if you exercise regularly. So sleep deprivation can actually lead to greater muscle atrophy. And the more your muscles waste away, the slower your metabolism will run when your body's at rest. FitTrack users who don't get enough ZZZs at night will be able to track this reaction inside the FitTrack app by monitoring their protein rate and BMR (basal metabolic rate).

People who don't get enough sleep are also more likely to experience injuries.

So what can you do to make sure you're getting enough sleep?

Even if you can't technically lose weight in your sleep, making sure that you're getting enough rest is incredibly important if you want to lose weight.

A good place to start would be to limit your overall caffeine intake and make sure you're not consuming any in the evening.

You should also be striving to get enough exercise every day so that you're thoroughly wiped out when it's time for bed.

Creating a bedtime ritual helps many people get a good night's rest. We recommend shutting down all electronic devices one hour before bed as a good place to start.

Monitoring your sleep is also tremendously helpful in order to find ways to optimize and improve the rest you get each night. SPOILER ALERT: We have some exciting new announcements coming very soon that can help you get the most out of bedtime. Want to be the first to know about them? Make sure you check back for regular updates!

 

 

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