Poor Sleep Habits Cause Pcos Weight Gain

One of the best, or maybe worst, kept secrets about having success at losing weight and keeping it off, revolves around issues with sleep. Many people who have problems with their weight don't understand that the quality of sleep that they have directly affects their ability to lose weight and keep it off. Poor sleep can lead to continual relentless weight gain if it is something that's not addressed. This unfortunately really penalizes women with PCOS even further with their weight loss struggles.

If you look at sleep as a broad category, women struggle with it much more typically then men do throughout our respective lifetimes. For women it is also, as a general statement, harder to lose weight then it is for men. These two things together can make for a really deep seeded problem. If a woman with PCOS has sleep problems as well as weight loss issues, she has got to get her sleep straightened out or she is not going to have success with the weight loss.

Sleep is when the body resets, the mind restores, and the spirit and psyche resolve difficulties. For one who experiences poor sleep, her metabolism as well as her ability to burn calories as fuel is affected.

Sleep problems can really mess up your underlying metabolism and your ability to lose PCOS related weight. Your body resets every time you get a good night sleep, however, when you have had a lousy night's sleep you don't get this reset effect, your metabolism essentially slows down. When your metabolism slows down, your body becomes more and more efficient at storing calories as fat instead of burning the calories you eat as fuel for your daily activities and to fuel your brain. Your metabolism is most inefficient late at night, because this is when your body expects to be resting.

Many women report that the later they stay up, the more they crave foods, especially sweets in the late hours of the night. When women give in to these cravings and eat calories late in the day, they usually wind up being stored as fat because they are not being burned off with activity. This is a fast way to turbo charge weight gain.

Typically, once you are able to establish better sleep habits, such as going to bed at a regular time and getting a full night's sleep, the weight gain will stop. After about three to four weeks you'll notice your late-night cravings starting to disappear and most women will see their weight start to slowly go down. It's important to remember that you didn't put the weight on overnight, and it will take some discipline for it to start to come off and won't happen immediately.

If poor sleep is a fact of life for you as a person with PCOS issues, please know that you must find a solution to it as a part of regaining the ability to lose that PCOS related weight and to keep it off for good. Even if you are doing everything else right, and only your sleep is a disaster, it will sabotage your best efforts for weight loss.

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