The Links Between Sleep and Weight Loss
Visions of weight loss are often associated with sweating it out on the treadmill and pushing away all your favorite foods. However, you may not envision your head hitting the pillow at night as a key part of your weight loss journey. In fact, sleep and weight loss go hand-in-hand, with sleep having a much more quintessential role than we may think in regulating the metabolism and building a foundation for success in the weight loss journey.
Sleep has a direct impact on your weight loss efforts by influencing hormone production, metabolic health, and physical recovery. Getting enough sleep sets the foundation for the rest of your weight loss journey, ensuring you have the energy needed to exercise, meal plan, hold yourself accountable and keep your weight loss efforts strong. Prioritizing your sleep for weight loss and metabolic health will go a long way toward fostering a successful wellness journey.
The Value of Sleep for Weight Loss and Wellness
Sleep plays an integral role in our overall health and wellness. Sleep regulates the circadian rhythm, hormone production, and more. The circadian rhythm is our internal clock and a pattern that the body follows that affects several aspects of human behavior and bodily processes, including food intake, digestion, stress responses, and more.
It’s important to get 7-9 hours of sleep each night to keep your circadian rhythm regulated and help your body maintain a healthy lifestyle pattern. A lack of adequate sleep can directly impact your circadian rhythm, which can affect a variety of areas in your overall wellness, including:
- Hormone production
- Metabolism
- Blood pressure
- Cardiovascular health
- Weight management
In fact, research shows that there may be a direct link between sleep and weight gain, with short sleep duration associated with high incidences of obesity. Understanding the value of sleep and its impact on our overall health and wellness allows us to better understand how we can take steps to use sleep to boost the success of a weight loss journey.
How Sleep Affects Weight Loss and Metabolic Health
With its effects on our overall health and wellness, sleep plays an important part in our weight loss and metabolic health. Ranging from excess eating to a slower metabolism, studies show that bad sleep can affect your metabolism in all the following ways.
Managing Your Appetite
Sleep has an important role in appetite management and regulating hormones that affect appetite—a lack of sleep can cause overeating and weight gain. Missing out on sleep can affect the balance of two crucial hormones, ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin signals to the brain that you are hungry, encouraging you to eat. Meanwhile, leptin signals to the brain when you are full, preventing you from overeating.
When a lack of sleep throws off this balance, it’s common that leptin you are likely to have a greater appetite and eat more. Sometimes, the link between sleep and weight gain is as straightforward as staying up later, leading to late-night snacking. Regardless of the cause, a lack of eating can lead to weight gain or stagnation that throws a wrench in your weight loss goals and makes it difficult to manage weight.
Regulating Your Metabolism
Less sleep can take a direct toll on your metabolic health, and consistent lack of sleep can potentially even lead to metabolic syndrome. Metabolism plays a crucial role in weight loss—metabolism is a bodily process that is responsible for converting the foods and drinks we consume into energy for our muscles and organs to use as fuel.
When your metabolism slows down, your body is less efficient at converting your food intake into energy and more likely to store excess calories as body fat. This is oversimplifying the crucial process, but, essentially, a slower metabolism results in weight gain and difficulty managing weight.
Getting less sleep results in a less efficient metabolism through a few key mechanisms. Getting more sleep won’t necessarily speed up your metabolism, but it will reduce the risk of disrupting your metabolic process. Poor sleep can keep cortisol high when you wake up in the morning, slowing down your thyroid and consequently, your metabolism.
A lack of sleep and metabolism are also linked indirectly, as missed sleep can potentially cause an influx of issues, including oxidative stress, an increase in blood sugar, and insulin resistance that can all result in metabolic dysregulation. Metabolism supplements may be able to help, but they likely won’t be enough to overcome unhealthy habits, and sleep is crucial for metabolic repair.
A Holistic Approach To Weight Loss re:vitalize programs address both body and mind, empowering you with the foods, tools, and habits you need for long-term weight loss success.
Balancing Your Hormones
We’ve already discussed the importance of sleep for hormone regulation, so it’s no surprise a lack of sleep can cause several potential hormone imbalances. In addition to throwing off your leptin and ghrelin balance, a lack of sleep can also affect your cortisol levels as well as other hormones like testosterone, progesterone, and human growth hormone.
Cortisol and weight gain go hand-in-hand—a rise in cortisol levels is correlated with an increase in insulin resistance and higher blood sugar levels. A reduced reaction to insulin in the body can lead to excess blood sugar from glucose failing to transfer into the muscles, which can make that sugar more likely to be stored as body fat.
Other hormones like testosterone and human growth hormone also play important parts in metabolic health. Although these hormones affect men, hormone imbalances from high cortisol that lead to metabolic dysregulation can affect men and women alike.
For example, a deficiency in testosterone is associated with higher fat mass, but even restricting sleep for just one week has been shown to decrease daily testosterone levels. Meanwhile, a lack of sleep can also impact other hormones like estrogen and estradiol in women, which are important for regulating food intake and weight management.
Managing Your Energy Levels
We all know how it feels to take on the day after a tough night of little to no sleep— it’s a struggle, to say the least. Dealing with that feeling throughout your weight loss journey is a crucial roadblock. On top of potentially leading to a decline in your metabolic health, a decrease in your energy levels can also take a toll on your motivation, which can affect your weight loss success.
Although exercise is not the only factor that promotes weight loss, it can be a valuable tool in the process. Exercise helps boost metabolic health, so a lack of physical activity can make it harder to lose weight. Thoughtful meal planning and mindful eating is also a crucial component to a successful weight loss journey. When you’re tired, you are less motivated and less likely to want to exercise or plan out your meals, so sleep sets an important foundation for achieving your goals.
How To Maintain Healthy Sleep Hygiene
Altogether, it’s important to prioritize sleep in your weight loss journey by building it into your schedule for the sake of improving your metabolic health and weight loss. It’s also important to remember that it’s not just the amount of sleep you get but the quality of sleep that you get.
The following tips will allow you to make the most of your sleep and build a strong foundation for your weight loss journey:
- Keep a consistent sleep schedule with a consistent bedtime ritual
- Maintain a dark sleep environment
- Avoid screens 1-2 hours before bedtime
- Avoid caffeine 6 hours before bedtime
- Avoid heavy meals before bed
- Incorporate stress management strategies
The best way to incorporate sleep into your weight loss journey is to prioritize it the same way you would healthy eating and exercise. Sleep matters just as much, and in some cases more. If you are prioritizing burning yourself out in the gym over getting 8 hours of sleep, you’re likely going to see more stagnation than progress.
Understanding how to get quality sleep is one thing, but staying accountable is another. For support in building healthy habits, you can turn to our team at re:vitalize weight loss and wellness. Our expert weight loss coaches will help you set the foundation for a successful weight loss journey based on quality sleep, healthy eating, and a strong mindset.
Achieve Metabolic Health and Lasting Weight Loss with re:vitalize
Ultimately, sleep is just as important to metabolic health and weight loss as any other aspect of your journey—maybe even more important. Getting enough sleep each night sets an important foundation, allowing your body to regulate important hormones, maintain a regular appetite, and have enough energy to stay on top of your weight loss journey.
At re:vitalize weight loss and wellness, our holistic weight loss programs are designed to empower individuals to achieve successful, lasting weight loss. Our board-certified nutritionists and expert health coaches provide a source of accountability that empowers you to experience real results. Through a Weight Loss and Metabolic Reset or Flexible Weight Loss program designed specifically for you and your health benchmarks, we’ll help you build the bridge to metabolic health, foster a healthy sleep schedule, and embrace stress management strategies that build you a holistic foundation for weight loss and wellness.
Schedule a virtual or in-person consultation with us at re:vitalize to learn more about how you can achieve sustainable weight loss once and for all.
