Gotta Get Some Sleep!

Bleh. I’m totally dragging today. I stayed up way too late last night, and got up way too early this morning. I’ll tell you, I’m so glad this is a day off from the gym for me because I don’t think there’s any way I could drag myself in today.

However, normally, I’m an 8-hours-a-night kind of girl. As it turns out, sleep is super important to not only losing weight but maintaining your weight. Here, let me say it another way: a regular lack of sleep, or low quality sleep, will assist in weight gain!

Not getting a good night’s sleep makes a lot of different things happen in your body. Aside from normal tiredness, your low energy level will make you less active during the day. You’re less likely to fidget (fidgety people can burn 100 or more calories each day!) or take that bike ride or run that normally sounds so nice.

Poor sleep also messes with a lot of hormones in your body—two of which are the hormones in charge of telling your body when you’re hungry and when you’re full. They’re called Leptin and Ghrelin; they’re the chemicals your brain uses to stimulate your apitite when your body needs energy (ghrelin) and trigger that feeling of fullness when you’ve eaten enough (leptin). There’s some fascinating research explained in this WebMD article, but the basic results are that without regular, good sleep your body just produces too much ghreling (making you hungry when you don’t necessarily need the calories) and too little leptin (making you more likely to keep eating even after you’ve eaten enough).

So what lesson did we learn here? Well, I know I’ll be going to be early tonight to catch up on my sleep. How about you? Any plans to change up your sleep habits? Have you noticed differences in the way you eat on tired days?