The Role Of Sleep In Successful Fat Loss Programs – 5 Reasons Why Shut Eye Is Your Best Friend For Losing Fat

Along with food and exercise, sleep is an integral component of a successful fat loss program. That may be a surprise to you simply because the usual topics of losing fat are diet and exercise. But the truth is, sleep plays just as an important role to your weight loss success as your nutrition and training does.

Now, there is a lot of scientific jargon that can be used to explain what the impact to not getting enough sleep has on your ability to lose fat. But rather than bore you with big words and long explanations, in simple terms, here are the 5 biggest reasons why you need your sleep to lose fat:

Leptin – When you feel hungry, you eat right? Well, this hormone helps control your feelings of hunger. A lack of sleep reduces the production of this hormone. As a consequence, whether it’s true or not, your brain will tell you you’re hungry which will cause you to eat. This means that the turkey on wheat sandwich which normally fills you for a couple hours, leaves you wanting more after about 30 minutes or less.

Grehlin – here is a hormone that has been shown to activate hunger which in turn promotes food consumption. When you don’t get sufficient sleep; the level of this hormone increases thereby promoting the feeling of being hungry. In addition, this hormone has also been noted for promoting fat retention and reducing the expenditure of energy. All of which are detrimental to any attempt at burning fat and losing weight.

Cortisol – You know that fat around your waist? Well, you can blame that fat…or at least the inability to get rid of it in part on this hormone. Cortisol is what you can refer to as a by-product of daily living. It is produced when you are stressed or put in a long term high intensity work-out. There is an association with this hormone and the fat surrounding your belly, meaning the more cortisol you produced the more likelihood of your belly fat increasing. Sleep to lose weight by reducing the amount of this hormone being produced in your body.

Insulin – Increased insulin resistance occurs with a lack of sleep. In simple terms what that means regarding fat loss is that the insulin receptors in your cells get a bad read on the glucose in your blood stream as they become less sensitive to insulin effects. As a result, more insulin gets produced to get rid of the glucose causing fat storage instead of fat loss.

You can think of it like planning dinner for a large family gathering, but you don’t get all the RSVPs therefore you don’t know who all is coming and how much to make. So you cook and bake your heart out to ensure you have enough food for everyone. Then you find out only half of the invited guests show up and now you have all these left-overs you have to figure out something to do with… which in most cases is to freeze it or store it. Yea it’s like that, what happens with insulin.

Mental – Your focus and determination become impaired when you don’t get enough sleep. You don’t always make the right choices when you’re tired and since food is often used as a way to “wake-up”…how often will you pick the piece of fruit over the bag of chips when choosing your wake-up call/food?

So to ensure success in your fat loss efforts, make sure to incorporate a minimum of 8 hours of sleep on average every night, doing so will help ensure that sleep and fat loss stay friends and not become foes.

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