If I were to go out on the street and spend the next day asking random people on the street, the most common answers I’d get would be diet and exercise. And while I don’t deny that these two things are very important to make sure you shed the pounds, there is something crucial missing from the equation: sleep.
The number of calories you consume and the amount of time you spend exercising are two important, often counted numbers in most people’s daily regimen, but it’s time you start counting the number of hours you sleep every day. Unfortunately, most folks don’t put enough stock into how important rest is for your health.
How many hours you rest a day affects you just as much as the foods you eat. Sleep deprivation can throw off the hormone production of your body, specifically the hormones that regulate hunger and cause an increase in appetite and cravings for high calorie, high carb foods.
Research shows that sleeping only 4 hours per night for 2 nights causes leptin — the hormone that tells your body to stop eating — to drop 18%. And levels of ghrelin — the hormone that says “eat more”– jump 28 percent.
How Long Should You Sleep for Weight Loss
“Seven to nine hours seems to be a pretty consistent time frame for when we get the best repair and where we have the least relationship to obesity,” says Shawn Arent, director of the Center for Health and Human Performance at Rutgers.
“In other words, it’s kind of that nice window where you don’t oversleep, you don’t under sleep, and there’s enough repair that takes place.”
The National Sleep Foundation generally recommends that adults rest for seven to nine hours every night, in order to wake up refreshed and alert for the day ahead.
And if you struggle to make this nine hours, there are a few tricks you can employ to make sure you stay snoozing through the night. For example, eating in bed. “Eating in the bedroom, especially right before bedtime, can be very disruptive to sleep,” says Robert I. Danoff, DO, family physician and program director, Aria Health System. Salt-filled snacks could make you thirsty, drinking too much fluid prior to bedtime may cause extra trips to the bathroom, and any caffeine within four hours of sleep may keep you awake or cause disrupted rest. Caffeine can also make you feel anxious and jittery.
You can also make sure that you sleep with an aligned spine. “Just as important as quantity of sleep is quality of sleep, and a large aspect of this is posture,” says Param Dedhia, MD director of Sleep Medicine at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona.
“A neutral spine can be on the back and it can be on the side. The positioning with pillows is key. When our body is neutral with an aligned spine, it allows our musculoskeletal and neurological system to be with less twisting, pushing and pulling. Neck, shoulder, low back and hip pain are less aggravated with a neutral spine,” says Dr. Dedhia.
