Is Poor Sleep Making You Fat?!

Sleep is something I work on with all my fat loss clients but often they are unsure why its relevant in helping them with their goal.

So the aim of this article is to help you understand how and why poor sleep is contributing to your fat gain or lack of fat loss!

I’m going to divide this into two sections to show you how sleep effects both your behaviours and your body and takes you away from fat loss.

Let’s start with the more simple stuff and look at how poor sleep effects behaviour.

I’m sure you can all relate to this that when your wake up after a poor night sleep you feel tired! And when you feel tired your good intentions and original plans for the day often get negatively impacted.

For example, when we are tired we;

1.     Don’t feel like exercising or going to the gym

2.     Don’t move around as much in the day (reduced step count!)

3.     We tend to reach for calorie dense food to comfort us

4.     We use food as a way of giving us extra energy to get through the day

Essentially we are less inclined to move and more inclined to overeat! So its easy to see how our behaviour after a poor nights sleep will work against fat loss. But what about changes going on inside the body?

Let’s quickly look at changes in the brain which links back to how it changes our behaviour as poor sleep will actual change our decision making.

When we are sleep deprived, we have decreased activity in an area in our brain called the prefrontal cortex. We use this area of our brain for many things including problem solving, decision making and self-control.

Decreased self-control can look like choosing the pizza over the chicken dish. Reduced will power can look like choosing the sofa over the gym after a long day. And reduced decision making can look like struggling to choose to have a square of chocolate, your own small bar or a whole sharing bag of maltesers!

You can see how this can make fat loss really challenging and contribute towards weight gain.

Lets now look at hormone changes.

Our hormones are effected by poor sleep and we are going to concentrate on ghrelin, leptin and insulin as these have been identified as being directly related to weight gain due to poor sleep.

Ghrelin makes us feel hungry. Levels normal rise just before we eat to increase hunger and then decrease after a meal. When we sleep our levels normaly drop as we don’t need to feel hunger or eat as we are sleeping. If we don’t sleep however our levels don’t drop and we therefore have high feelings of hunger even though we don’t need the extra calories.

Leptin on the other hand is a hormone responsible for making us feel full and is directly related to the amount of fat we have in the body. More fat equals more leptin and in a healthy person as our fat levels start to increase, leptin levels should also adjust and signals to the brain to reduce appetite. They should also raise in the night when we sleep as we don’t need a drive for hunger .

When our sleep is disrupted however our levels remain low and so our drive for hunger is high and the brain sends hunger signals resulting in us eating even though we don’t necessarily need it.

Sleep deprivation therefore leaves us feeling both hungrier and less full then we actually are. So again , it’s not hard to see how this can lead to fat gain.

The hormone insulin also plays a role. Insulin is released in response to eating as a way of regulating our rising blood sugar levels after we’ve eaten food. It does this by increasing the uptake of blood glucose into our cells where it is used for energy with excess being stored in muscle, fat and liver cells.

If we become insulin resistant, we need to produce more insulin for the body to shuttle the same amount of glucose out of the blood stream but what also happens as we become more resistant is that we start to store the excess sugar in our blood stream as fat, with the body attempting to store the excess energy for later!

Studies have shown that poor sleep and sleep deprivation lead to increased insulin resistance and so you can see how this can contribute to increased levels of fat.

So to summarise, failing to get the sleep your body needs can result in unwanted fat gain by effected both your body and your behaviour.

This is largely due to disruption to hormones, our brains decision making capacity, self-control and behaviours.

Over the next few weeks we are therefore going to look at what factors can affect your sleep and how to improve it to help you maximise your fat loss goals.

If you want any more help or have any questions please email me lizzie@onepercentclub.info and we can have a chat.

Have a great week!

Lizzie x

The One Percent Club

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