9
Sleep Your Way
to a Lean Body
“My deep sleep went from about two to three hours to five-plus hours since doing The Belly Burn Plan. It was 100 percent due to the Plan and following the advice to stop eating three hours before bedtime.”
—BECKY C., AGE 43
Jenny was having trouble finding the time to sleep. Her nonstop schedule, even on the weekends, just didn’t allow it. When she finally managed to sleep, it was only for about six hours—and many of those hours were interrupted by constant tossing and turning and running through the long to-do list in her mind.
Over the past few years, Jenny noticed the bags under her eyes were more pronounced and her skin wasn’t as resilient as it used to be. She knew she needed to make sleep more of a priority, but after putting the kids to bed, she wanted to spend more downtime with her husband.
The pressure Jenny put on herself to exercise still motivated her to get up early in the morning, but she didn’t get the same “postworkout kick” she used to. It wasn’t uncommon for Jenny to grab a coffee later in the day for a quick afternoon pick-me-up, and that was on top of her usual morning cup. Deep down, she knew that her workouts were one of the reasons she needed more sleep, but she couldn’t imagine where she’d find the time to get an extra hour, even if only a couple of nights a week.
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Sleep is a simple thing, yet most of us manage to throw off this one element of health that requires little, if any, work at all. Night after night we deprive our bodies of the amount of rest needed to keep our bodies optimally healthy. Our 24/7 lifestyle leaves little room for the weary, and nonstop access to Wi-Fi means there’s always work to do, email to read, candy to crush. Grocery stores, restaurants and even banks available ’round the clock all but eliminate the need to put something off for the next day. We’ve become conditioned to do with less sleep in the name of efficiency, even if it takes a toll on our health.
Over the past fifty years, Americans have managed to cut the average length of nightly sleep down nearly two full hours (1). In fact, 65 percent of Americans now get six or fewer hours of sleep a night (2). Shut-eye gets passed over for “doing something useful,” like cleaning the house, catching up with friends or just relaxing in front of the TV. It’s time to put your health first—the omission of sleep can have a cascading effect on your hormones, not to mention the amount of belly fat you collect. For the rest of the chapter, think of sleep as food. The only difference is more, not less, is better!
Most of us know that our bodies require a full seven to eight hours of sleep every night. Work and family responsibilities are usually the two most common reasons people don’t get enough shut-eye. For a mother caring for an infant or young children, this is understandable and hopefully a short stage of life that eventually leads to more sleep. As a mother with three young children, I remember many sleepless nights. My kids are amazing and I love them to pieces, but they’re sleep thieves, too. After baby number one, everything was great. All I had to focus on was my new little girl, and nap when she napped.
When my second little girl came along two and a half years later, I was in the throes of getting a toddler potty trained and managing the needs of a newborn. Sleep? It was a tough commodity to come by. For several months, I opted to sleep instead of staying up later to catch up with my husband, watch TV, or even do that extra load of laundry … and I was a lot more sane for doing so. While I worked on prioritizing my sleep, my newborn got the hang of sleeping through the night, too. Eventually, it all worked out. It’s okay to prioritize your needs over household chores. The world won’t fall apart and sooner or later, everything comes together.
Parenting is just one common example of how both women and men can get thrown off their sleep schedule. Caregivers of sick relatives, people with demanding work schedules and, well, those among us who voluntarily sacrifice sleep for social life all fall prey to less-than-stellar sleep quality. If you can identify with more than one of these types, you’re not alone. The point is not to make the impossible “perfect lifetime of sleep” possible, rather to take advantage of the times you have in your life to get sleep. It’s so important!
A bad diet and very little activity certainly impact how much and where our bodies store fat, but the amount of sleep we get plays a vital role. Our bodies’ delicate endocrine system, which regulates the hormones in our bodies, is just as dependent on sleep as it is on food and fitness. Even modest sleep deprivation over a short period of time can throw off the hormones responsible for storing more fat than our bodies need.
On a primal level, our bodies interpret sleep deprivation as a form of stress. The less we sleep, the more stressed our bodies become. This ends up affecting the amount of human growth hormone (HGH), insulin and cortisol our bodies release.
About ninety minutes into a good night of sleep, our bodies send signals to release plenty of HGH. Not only does HGH help to repair injury to our bodies, but also to develop muscle that is broken down. This release of HGH continues to kick in about every ninety minutes and should occur about five times a night. When we don’t get enough sleep, or wake often throughout the night, HGH release grinds to a halt and our bodies can’t develop muscle the way that they should.
A compelling study conducted at the University of Chicago looked at two groups of people, both on a low-calorie diet, for two weeks. One group slept 5.5 hours a night, and another group slept 8.5 hours a night. That mere three-hour difference had a profound impact on each of the group members’ body fat. Can you guess which group took the biggest hit? When it came to weight loss, all participants shed approximately 7 pounds of weight. Not bad, right? It turns out the group whose members slept the full 8.5 hours lost body fat, but the group whose members slept only 5.5 hours lost mostly muscle (3)!
If you regularly go to bed later than you should, or wake up too early, don’t be surprised if you find it hard to develop or maintain muscle—even with a great diet or strict workout routine. Don’t let the hard work you’re doing to take care of your body go to waste by selling yourself short at night. Your body needs the sleep to rebuild broken-down muscle, not just to feel refreshed and alert.
Insulin sensitivity is also greatly affected by sleep. Remember, it’s a good thing to be sensitive to insulin. Chapter 1 told us about the relationship between insulin, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes when it comes to the foods we eat, but it turns out that sleep plays an important role in regulating insulin as well.
When we don’t get enough sleep, our cells respond much in the same way as if we ate sugar all the time—we become desensitized to insulin. When sleep is compromised—even for as little as four days—insulin sensitivity of fat cells decreases by 30 percent. Indeed, all those harmless nights of less sleep actually promote insulin resistance (4), (5). This is comparable to insulin’s response between a nondiabetic and a diabetic. When fat cells don’t move insulin the way they should, our body can’t move the fatty acids inside the cell either. Fatty acids that don’t get moved out of the cell increase the actual size of the cell as well as our overall body fat.
It’s important to remember that we don’t get rid of fat cells through diet, exercise or sleep. We simply increase and decrease the size. We now know that adequate sleep helps us move fatty acids out of the cells, shuttling them to muscles so they can be used for energy.
The next time you miss a couple of hours of sleep, pay attention to your appetite the following day. When we’re sleep deprived for just a few days, leptin and ghrelin, two hormones that play an important role in how much we eat, are dramatically affected. When we get a good night of sleep, our bodies’ level of leptin, the hormone that tells us that we’re full, and our bodies’ level of ghrelin, the hormone that tells us that we’re hungry, are in good working order. Sleep deprivation throws these two hormones on their heads. After just two nights of less sleep, your body starts to produce less leptin (6). In other words, your body will take longer to realize that it’s full. Much of the reason for this is because ghrelin levels have increased. When ghrelin increases, we think we’re hungrier much more often than we really are. The result? We eat more.
While appetite isn’t controlled exclusively by sleep, it plays an important role in how much we’ll want to eat the following day. We’re quick to chalk appetite up to hormones triggered by stress or premenstrual syndrome, but as you can see, that’s not always the case. It’s very difficult to push the plate away when your body cells are literally sending signals that you’re still hungry.
When we go to sleep, cortisol, our bodies’ stress hormone, should be at its lowest point. After a full night of sleep, cortisol is topped up and we’re ready to face the day, taking on any typical stressors that might come our way. When we deprive ourselves of sleep, however, cortisol levels are thrown off the next day, particularly in the evening hours when we should be winding down.
When we throw our bodies’ circadian rhythm off the next day by not getting the right amount of sleep, our bodies immediately start preparing for the next night, assuming we’ll want to follow the same pattern as the night before—sleep less. Shaving off a couple of hours of sleep for just one night has been shown to increase cortisol levels by 37 percent around the time you’re ready to go to bed the following evening (7). This hormonal effect helps to explain why we suddenly get a second wind when it’s time to turn out the lights. We might feel wiped out and incredibly tired, but falling asleep can become more difficult. Just one night’s lack of sleep can actually create the same symptoms that people with insomnia experience.
Even though cortisol is attempting to give us a hand by stimulating our bodies late into the night, the day following a poor night of sleep, it’s also rallying the troops to protect us. When we’re sleep deprived, the excess cortisol produced late at night sends signals to our bodies that we’re under stress, or being attacked. Remember, stress can be physical, emotional or physiological. The result of this cortisol-protected attack is extra fat storage throughout the midsection where the most protection is needed.
The best way to prevent cortisol levels from getting out of whack is by getting into the habit of going to bed at the same time every night. Burning the candle at both ends throughout the week to finish up on a work project only sets you up for a weekend of restless sleep. Similarly, staying up late at night on the weekend won’t help you feel very well rested on Monday morning either. No one should avoid a social life to head home before the sun goes down all for a good night’s sleep, but getting a full night of sleep lets your body reap all the benefits it deserves.
Now comes the good news: the negative effects of sleep deprivation are completely reversible. In fact, after just a few nights of good sleep, your body starts rebounding, regulating HGH, insulin, leptin, ghrelin and cortisol back to normal levels. Your body may have a few extra pounds to lose, but rest assured that sleeping more can only help your body shed extra fat. Sleep is food for our brain, body and metabolism. It’s just as important as a healthy meal or a vigorous workout.
According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2005 poll on insomnia, approximately 50 percent of the respondents reported at least one symptom of insomnia several nights a week, and 30 percent of respondents said they dealt with symptoms of insomnia every night (8). Usually affecting more women than men, insomnia can be transient (usually the result of travel or acute illness) or chronic (common among people suffering long illness or ongoing stress).
Insomnia is characterized by the following symptoms:
Insomnia is different from the occasional night of staying up too late or waking up too early, but the long-term hormonal effects and health consequences of both are very real and happen quickly.
Since none of us can guarantee that we’ll never have a poor night of sleep again, it’s important to know what we can do to help keep sleepless nights at bay. More often than not, many of our day-to-day habits contribute to less-than-optimal sleep. If you’re struggling with insomnia or have an occasional run-in with a sleepless night, try some of these practices to get back on track today.