If one of your goals is to burn fat and lose weight, there may be one key factor you’re not paying enough attention to.

Sleep.

According to the Center for Disease Control, more than one in three Americans is sleep-deprived, meaning they get less than seven hours of sleep per night. Lack of sleep (or low-quality sleep) does more than just make us feel groggy the next morning. There are much deeper consequences that even a morning latte can’t fix!

When You’re Tired, You’re Hungry

Lack of sleep is just one factor that can lead to obesity or one’s inability to burn fat. That’s because it directly affects hunger levels.

There are two primary hormones that control hunger: ghrelin, which tells your brain that you’re hungry, and leptin, which lets your brain know you’re full.

When you get less than six hours of sleep, your ghrelin ticks up and your leptin levels drop. This results in your stomach telling your brain that you’re hungry when you’re not. The less sleep you get, the further this crossing of hormones is compounded and the stronger the hunger pangs.

Getting at least seven hours of sleep will help you keep these two critical hormones in check so you’re not tricking your brain into thinking you’re hungry when you’re not.

Quality Matters, Too

Circadian rhythms are the 24-hour cycles that are part of your body’s internal clock. It basically runs in the background to carry out your body’s essential functions.

One hormone regulated by our circadian rhythms is human growth hormone (HGH). This hormone, which aids in repairing muscle and tissue, allowing your body to recover after a workout, is generally released between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. So if you are not going to sleep until 10 p.m. or later, you’re depriving your body of some of its most crucial recovery hours.

This doesn’t mean you can just slide into bed at 9:50 p.m., conk out and start your recovery. Remember, it’s not just the sleep itself, but the quality of that sleep. Ideally, you want to be in REM sleep — the part of the deep sleep cycle during which rapid eye movement (REM) occurs — during that 10–2 window. This will allow your body to generate more HGH while also maximizing its recovery benefits.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, REM sleep arrives about an hour and a half after you go to sleep. The first REM period lasts about 10 minutes. Each REM stage that follows gets longer and longer.

So you should aim for your sleep to peak between the hours of 10–2.

Sleep Your Way Past a Plateau

If you’re not getting enough sleep, and enough deep sleep, then you’re not recovering effectively from your workouts, which negatively affects your ability to perform in your next workout. This is one of the reasons many people struggle to see consistent results.

Plateaus happen faster. Frustration sets in.

Combine this with the appetite dysregulation that occurs because your ghrelin and leptin signals are getting crossed due to lack of sleep, and it’s nearly impossible to stay motivated and consistent, regardless of your health and fitness goals.

It has nothing to do with your desire.

It’s a sleep issue.

A lack of sleep can also make your body feel like it’s in distress, triggering production of the stress hormone cortisol. This can result in inflammation in the form of water retention. So you may feel like you’ve gained weight because your pants are tighter or your fingers and feet feel puffy, but it’s really just the result of inflammation due to a lack of sleep and poor recovery.

So … What Can I Do?

There are a few simple things you can do to help improve your sleep:

Skip the nightcap: Avoid drinking alcohol within four hours of going to sleep.
Power Down: Avoid blue light (phone, computer, television) close to bedtime. As your bedtime gets closer, slowly eliminate or dim the lights in the house. This will signal to your body that it’s almost time for bed, so when you hit the pillow, your body knows what to do.
Be Consistent: Try going to sleep at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning. As with anything else, consistency is key.
Stay on Schedule: Try intermittent fasting, which is simply an eating schedule. That, combined with meal-prepping, will provide a structure for you to follow, giving you another line of defense against cravings and that tricky ghrelin-leptin imbalance.
Eat an Early Dinner: Closing your feeding window at least two to three hours before bed will help prepare your body for restorative sleep. Your body will be available to switch into scrub-and-repair mode because it won’t be busy digesting food.
Eat Whole Foods: Avoiding high-fat foods (especially close to bedtime) and replacing processed foods with whole foods in your diet will help regulate your digestive tract, making it easier for you to sleep and to regulate your hunger hormones.
Control What You Can Control: Life is hard. We know! There’s work, kids, dishes, laundry — it’s always something. At the FASTer Way, we preach Progress over Perfection. If you’re having trouble staying consistent in your routine, or if you get off track for a day, simply start again!

If you’re having trouble burning fat and losing weight, take a look at how you’re sleeping. You’ll find a lot of answers, many of them simple to implement. It doesn’t have to be so hard!

If you’re looking for more simple strategies to help you burn fat, lose weight and live a healthy, more confident lifestyle, come join us in our FASTer Way to Fat Loss 6-week program. We combine some of the simple strategies referenced above with other science-backed techniques that result in a healthy, sustainable lifestyle that’s different than the crash diets that simply don’t work.

Paired with easy-to-follow meal plans and effective 30-minute workouts that give you the freedom to spend less time on food and exercise and more time on the things you love, these strategies can help turn your body into a fat-burning machine!

Click the button below to find out for yourself.

Until then, sleep tight!

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