Get enough sleep to lose weight for summer—you’ll improve cardiovascular health too! Getting adequate rest every night is one of the simplest and most dramatic ways to improve body composition quickly. If you make one change to get lean for summer, make it a habit to get at least 8 hours of sleep every night by establishing a consistent sleep schedule. I guarantee that with adequate rest you will improve body composition and just feel all around better.
The reason is that getting enough sleep and going to bed at the same time every night directly influence hormone and neurotransmitter activity. These chemical messengers dictate your cognitive and physical function, influencing fat storage and energy use in the body. Research shows that chronic sleep deprivation has consequences for three areas of the blain that influence body composition and put you at risk of serious disease.
First, getting just one hour less of sleep per night than you need will alter the activity of the hypothalamus and result in higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Higher cortisol can increase appetite in some individuals, and it has a direct effect on enhancing fat storage, especially in the abdomen, muscle, and organs—all places you don’t want fat to be stored.
Second, sleep deprivation will alter the brain’s ability to use glucose, which can effect glucose metabolism throughout the body, resulting in insulin resistance and fat gain. Dangerous side effects of insulin resistance are oxidative stress and inflammation.
Third, lack of sleep will directly impair immune function, which causes a cascade of negative health effects that put you at risk of disease, a side effect of which is poor body composition. Another result of poor immune function is a change in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. In fact, just five days of short sleep duration can produce erratic changes in heart rate variability and blood pressure. We also know that the strength of the immune system is correlated with the ability to develop hypertrophy.
These two markers of cardiovascular activity need to be stable and consistent for optimal health, and persistent changes will put you at risk of heart disease and poor physical function. Just think about it—if your heart rate and blood pressure are all over the chart, you won’t be able to perform well, let alone lose weight or recover from hard training effectively.
If you don’t get enough sleep, the first thing you have to do to make a change is to make the following commitments:
• Commit to get a certain amount of sleep nightly. Base this on your own needs—most people need at least 8 hours, but some feel fine with less. “Normal” average sleep duration has decreased from 9 hours a night in 1910 to 7 hours currently.
• Research shows better body composition and overall health are more common in people with early-to-bed and early-to-rise sleep patterns. If possible, commit to a 9:30 pm to 6:00 am schedule, or something similar.
• Try to stay on your sleep schedule on the weekend. Staying up late on Friday and Saturday night and sleeping late the next morning will throw the whole schedule off and make it harder for you to go to sleep at your set bedtime on Sunday night. Sunday night and Monday morning are critical to setting up you week for success.
• If you can fit short naps in during the day to make up for less than adequate sleep, do it. For tips on napping, check out
The Wisdom of Napping.
Reference
Dettoni, J., Marciano, F., et al. Cardiovascular Effects of {partial Sleep Deprivation in Healthy Volunteers. Journal of Applied Physiology. 2012. Published Ahead of Print.
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