If you were told that you could go to bed tonight and start losing weight until you wake up, would you believe it? While weight loss during your sleep isn’t powerful enough to make up your entire strategy, you may be surprised at the difference it can make when you add the right overnight techniques to your diet and exercise efforts.
Sleep, itself, is actually a fantastic weight loss tool unto itself. Getting the right amount of sleep on a regular basis can be one of the best things you can do for yourself for making it easier to watch the numbers on the bathroom scale fall. Several studies have shown that getting enough sleep – not too little but also not too much – can greatly decrease the struggle associated with dieting.
While sleeping properly may not simply cause fat to magically melt off the body, it can make it feel that way. It’s actually quite powerful.
Research shows that when people aren’t getting enough sleep, or when they are regularly oversleeping, they tend to have a bigger appetite. Moreover, when mealtime comes around, people who haven’t slept well also tend to make choices that are unfriendly to efforts for weight loss or weight maintenance. Sleep deprivation is directly linked with a risk of weight gain.
There are several reasons for this, but the majority of them are connected with hormones. This is because when you don’t have enough sleep, your hormones kick in to help you to keep functioning. Therefore, if you aren’t well rested enough your hormones will, for instance, cause you to crave sugary and fatty foods that are packed with calories in order to replace the energy you don’t have from having slept. The hormone called ghrelin is to be blamed for that effect.
Furthermore, sleep deprivation can also increase stress and anxiety levels, which causes the secretion of cortisol, the stress hormone. That hormone is notorious for effects that make it easy to gain weight but tougher to lose it.
Therefore, placing a strong focus on getting enough sleep at night can make your dieting so much more effective that it can feel as though you are actually resting the pounds away at night. Your food cravings decrease, your body is better prepared to burn fat instead of packing it on, and you will naturally have more energy to remain motivated and to power through your workouts.
