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Sleep and Weight Loss

The Top 100 Weight Loss Tips keep right on coming with this latest showing at article number 70 in the series.

This time I'm going to look at the importance of sleep with regard to losing weight and how the amount of sleep we get affects our ability to stay in shape or otherwise.

Weight Loss Sleep

Did you know that you can sleep and lose weight! Well, it appears that not too many people know that in order to be a highly efficient fat-burning, slimming machine, the human body needs a good eight hours sleep every night. This is a really important part of anyone's slimming program and for plenty of really good reasons.

Plenty of people tend to think that they are doing themselves a big favor by sleeping less, but they’re quite mistaken in that. You have to give your body the time it needs to rest itself, from both a mental and physical viewpoint.

Here's some of the reasons that sleep is so important for your health and to help you to lose weight.

• It provides mental alertness for the following day
• It allows muscles to heal, regenerate and build after a workout
• While muscles are healing and building, they are using up calories even if you're not awake
• You wake up feeling more refreshed and motivated to achieve your weight loss goals

Tiredness During the Day

On the other hand, lack of sleep causes daytime tiredness, lack of alertness, reduced motivation, lethargy, listlessness, headaches which can prevent you from exercising and more hunger, meaning you are likely to eat more and snack on sugary snacks in an unconscious effort to try to boost your energy levels. This is all counter productive if you are trying to shed a few pounds and can actually lead to weight gain in the long term especially if you continually deprive your body of the full quota of sleep that it needs.

I'm sure you'd prefer to feel awake, alert and full of energy during the day. That way you are much more likely to feel more motivated to go that extra mile in order to fulfill your weight loss strategy.

The more awake and alert you are during the day, the more aware you are of what you are eating and how you are exercising. That means you're better equipped to say "NO" to the kinds of food and drinks that may be disastrous to your diet, while being more aware that you need to be as active as possible to burn calories and keep your metabolism elevated.

It all has a knock on effect because when you have a good day followed by a good night's sleep, you'll follow that with another good day and keep repeating the pattern to the benefit of your health and desire to shed those excess pounds.

So make sure you get your nightly allowance of eight hours or so sleep every night. They don't call it beauty sleep for nothing!

100 Weight Loss Tips number 69 follows in the next post!

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Posted on Sun, 02 Aug 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 2 Comments