The importance of sleep as a contributor to every aspect of health in your life is impossible to overemphasize. Poor sleep puts every other pursuit on hold, or extremely delayed. Bottom line, you have to make good sleep a priority in order to enjoy a happy, healthy journey.
Long known as the time for your body to recover and rebuild, more evidence has arrived showing the link between sleep and maintaining a healthy weight. Want to lose weight? Lose it by sleeping more.
Researchers at Tubingen and Lubeck universities in Germany, in combination with Uppsala University in Sweden, looked at how short-term sleep deprivation effects hunger, energy levels, and physical activity. The results showed that the less sleep a person got the hungrier they felt.
Have you ever felt like that? I know have. On days after a bad night’s rest I feel like I want to eat a lot more frequently, and my diligence in choosing quality foods decreases. Well here’s why. The researchers discovered that poor sleep raises the level of the hormone called ghrelin, the hunger hormone.
Being hungry and groggy, even after just one night, the study participants not only did less physical activity but also burned fewer calories while in a resting state. That poor sleep turned them into ghrelin gremlins.
What does this mean? You get hit with a double whammy. You eat more because of the increased ghrelin, and you burn fewer calories because you move less and your resting metabolism has slowed. It’s a no-win situation.
Paying attention to what you eat and making efforts to move your body more are significant contributors to your overall health. But those efforts will be greatly enhanced if you make sleep a priority.
