Your Ability To Slim Down Is Directly Tied To Your Sleeping Habits
Are you struggling to drop some inches around your waist and don’t know why? Find out that the quality of your sleep might affect your ability to slim down.
If you’ve tried all the popular diet plans and fitness programs and can’t seem to budge the scale, it might not be your fault.
You might be doing everything right in terms of diet and exercise, but if you’re not sleeping well, your body fat won’t budge.
So let’s see how sleep impacts our ability to burn fat and slim down. Because yes, the link between sleep and weight loss is real.
Quality, Deep Sleep Is Essential For Fat Loss
If you’re not getting quality sleep, you’re not going to lose weight. This claim might sound simple on the surface, but there’s science to back it up.
During a typical night’s sleep, your body will complete four or five sleep cycles that begin with non-REM sleep and end with REM sleep.
- Non-REM sleep accounts for about 75% of your entire night’s sleep.
- REM sleep accounts for about 25 percent.
It’s imperative to reach REM sleep in order to get quality sleep since that’s the phase where bodily restoration takes place.
Some factors that prevent people from reaching REM sleep include:
- High levels of cortisol and adrenaline;
- An uncomfortable mattress or pillow;
- An interrupted circadian rhythm;
- And interrupted sleep.
Unfortunately, when you’re unable to achieve REM sleep over an extended period of time, your body produces more adrenaline and cortisol, which taxes your adrenal glands and leaves you exhausted.
Although you’re technically getting light sleep, this is still a form of sleep deprivation.
When your body is deprived of deep sleep and your adrenal glands are on overdrive, you’re more likely to gain weight. Excess cortisol stimulates glucose production which is converted into fat and eventually stored as fat.
Some research has even shown that excess adrenaline causes fat cells to become unresponsive to adrenaline’s “instructions” to release fat and more responsive to cortisol’s “instructions” to store fat.
Ready To Slim Down By Sleeping Better At Night?
By now, you should be convinced that getting a better night’s sleep is one of the most important factors in losing weight.
The standard advice for getting a good night’s sleep says you need to establish a bedtime routine and stick to it night after night to get your body used to a consistent schedule. That’s great advice, but there’s more.
Your mattress and pillow play a large role in how well you sleep, even if you’re not aware of it.
For example, many people are still using the same mattress after twenty years and don’t realize it’s time to replace it. Other people use old, flattened memory foam pillows or pillows that don’t support their neck and spine.
Until you’ve slept on a high-quality mattress (like a memory foam mattress), it’s impossible to know if you’re truly getting a good night’s sleep. The same goes for pillows.
To get a better night’s sleep, start with establishing a bedtime routine and also start looking for a new mattress.
How To Get The Best Mattress For Your Sleep?
Don’t buy the first mattress that feels good in the store. Take your time to shop around and lie down on each mattress for at least five or ten minutes to get a realistic sense of what that mattress feels like.
Also, remember that most mattresses on display are full size and getting a different size will slightly alter how you experience the mattress’ firmness.
Be careful when buying a used mattress from someone you don’t know, and don’t let a mattress store charge you more than what the mattress is worth.
Buying a mattress from a brick-and-mortar store can be unnecessarily complex and frustrating.
Rather than paying the full ticket price on the mattress you want, look for deals online for the same mattress and negotiate with the salesperson.
Even better, find the mattress you want by checking out the mattresses in the store and then buy it online to bypass the frustration of negotiating and annoying salespeople trying to upsell you on expensive pillows and sheets.
Sleep Well To Easily Slim Down
Once you recover from sleep deprivation, adrenal fatigue, or any other issues you’re experiencing due to poor sleep, you’ll see better progress on your fat loss journey.
Just remember, if you’re going to have a cheat meal or a cheat day, don’t cheat yourself out of good sleep. You can recover after eating a few cookies, but recovering from sleep deprivation is much more difficult.
Hopefully, these tips will help you get a good night’s sleep and eventually slim down to achieve the physique you’ve always dreamed of.
Anyway, remember that sleep impacts your weight loss process, and the better you sleep at night, the slimmer you’ll get at day.
