Want to know my number one diet tip? It has nothing – and everything – to do with the foods you eat and exercise you do.The best thing you can do to have a lean fit body is to get a good night’s sleep. I’m talking quantity and quality here. If you sleep eight hours, but wake up three times during the night to go to the bathroom, you’re not getting high-quality sleep, and the repercussions can show up around your waistline.

If you think the worst aftermath of a crappy night’s sleep is that you snap at your partner the following morning and make a few lapses in judgment during the day, think again.

Here’s the truth: lack of sleep can make you fat because how you sleep directly impacts how much you eat and what kind of foods you eat. In other words, whether you get a solid eight hours or a toss-and-turn six hours can determine whether you go face-down in the Haagan Daz or choose frozen blueberries and Greek yogurt. Even if you do reach for the Fage, sleep can determine whether you eat sensibly or devour the whole container. (Remember that healthy food becomes unhealthy when you overindulge.)

Solid or substandard slumber also signals your body to store fat or burn it for fuel because of its impact on insulin, leptin and cortisol(more later). Getting a quality eight and a half hours’ sleep supports better fat burning the following day. Sleep even accounts for your degree of hunger. If you find yourself wandering to the Danish cart at 3 p.m. after you ate a substantial lunch, you might want to look at how well you slept the proceeding night.

Hormones play a huge part in this process. Ghrelin, a hormone that tells your brain to eat now, increases when you sleep poorly. Leptin, on the other hand, helps put the brakes on the brownie cheesecake. No surprise: when you don’t sleep, you become more leptin resistant. Insulin is also impacted by poor sleep. Chronically elevated insulin makes it difficult to burn fat for fuel.

Long-term sleep deprivation can make your cells insulin resistant which leads to higher fasting insulin levels.  Besides impairing fat burning, these high levels can also lead to diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

Have I convinced you yet that sleep plays a huge role in whether you get into those skinny jeans for the show Saturday night?  A study at the University of Chicago, with the unwieldy title “Exposure to recurrent sleep restriction in the setting of high caloric intake and physical inactivity results in increased insulin resistance and reduced glucose tolerance,” concluded that even if you eat healthy and exercise, not getting the recommend 7 – 9 hours of sleep per night puts you at risk for obesity. In other words, poor sleep patterns can screw up even your best efforts to have the body you want.

I know how many of you think. If I cut back one hour of sleep, I can get that report finished or a couple hours’ less sleep on the weekend to have drinks with the girls won’t hurt me once in a while.  It’s tempting, but the reality isn’t pretty. Even one hour less sleep can trigger hormonal chaos. You eat more, move less, make terrible eating choices, and exacerbate stress levels.

As a nation, we are more stressed out than ever and poor sleep is one of the more controllable sources of stress (you can’t really fire your boss, can you?)  When you are under stress, your body can secrete more cortisol and adrenaline.  Higher cortisol levels make you better at storing fat and raise the setpoint for burning it off. What’s more, high cortisol levels impair digestion.

Your cortisol levels remain high for longer periods when you get less-than-optimal sleep. What ensues becomes a vicious cycle. High cortisol burns up your energy-assisting B vitamins, and you can’t make the neurotransmitters you need to sleep well. This Jeckyll-and-Hyde hormone also lowers levels of serotonin, the feel-good hormone your brain eventually converts to melatonin for – you guessed it – good sleep.

Let’s look at how this downward spiral plays out. You sleep terribly so you hit the snooze button multiple times. You’re too tired to make your morning shake, so you grab a  “low-fat” muffin (nothing more than a sugar laden cupcake in disguise) and a large latte for that caffeine pick-me-up. By mid-morning, you’re drowning in stress, dealing with a sugar crash, angry at everyone in sight, and finally say To hell with it and grab a doughnut a co-worker brought in.

And don’t think you can just crank back the calories and do some cardio to make up for that sleep-deprived hormonal flux. It drives me crazy when I hear about people who cut back on sleep to get in a good workout before work. If you want strong, sexy arms, you have to pack in those zzz’s. Sleep helps your body repair, rebuild, and recover from the strenuous effort you put in at the gym. Like vigorous exercise, sleep also increases growth hormone, or HGH. So let’s say you got a pitiful five hours of sleep, and scheduled your trainer for 6 a.m. You certainly won’t be able to train with the intensity you would with substantial rest, particularly when you’re yawning and wondering why that fourth cup of coffee never kicked in.

You also won’t recover as well from a tough workout when you don’t sleep well. You don’t give your body the chance to repair muscle mass, and you accelerate the aging process. It’s a lose-lose situation if I’ve ever seen one.

So you get it: you need sleep. But it’s sometimes hard to put the brakes on life and unwind after a frenetic day. Look for a ritual that helps you relax, whether that includes soothing music, a meditation CD, or a hot bath.  Just don’t make too much alcohol part of that sleep ritual. A glass of pinot noir at dinner will help you relax, but add in a nightcap or two and you will wake up dehydrated at 3 a.m. Exactly what you don’t need for a good night’s sleep.

The take-away, make time for sleep as your number one strategy for both a lean, healthy body and optimal health.

Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19567526
Exposure to recurrent sleep restriction in the setting of high caloric intake and physical inactivity results in increased insulin resistance and reduced glucose tolerance.
•       Nedeltcheva AV, Kessler L, Imperial J, Penev PD.
•       Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637; General Clinical Research Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637.
•       Results: Conclusions: Experimental bedtime restriction, designed to approximate the short sleep times experienced by many individuals in Westernized societies, may facilitate the development of insulin resistance and reduced glucose tolerance.

© 2011 JJ Virgin & Associates, Inc. Celebrity Nutrition & Fitness Expert JJ Virgin helps clients lose weight fast by breaking free from food allergies.  She is the bestselling author of Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy, a Huffington Post blogger, creator of the 4X4 Burst Training Workout & co-star of TLC’s Freaky Eaters. Visit her at http://www.jjvirgin.com to take the quiz & find out if Your “Healthy” Habits are Making You Tired, Bloated & Age Faster? 

Can spending more time in the bedroom trigger fast fat loss? Tim Felton proves it can. He credits sleeping better for the 150 pounds he burned over a year and a half.

That fast fat loss began after Tim visited Dr. Dimi Barot, a sleep neurologist, for excessive snoring and painful migraines. Dr. Barot put Tim on a continuous positive air pressure machine (CPAP), which boosted his oxygen intake.

Tim stopped snoring. The migraines disappeared. But something unexpected also occurred. When he began sleeping better, fat began to disappear from Tim’s 365-pound body.

“The three fat hormones cortisol, leptin, and ghrelin are dependent upon normal and healthy sleep,” says Dr. Barot. “So many people jump-start… their metabolism when they effectively are treated for sleep apnea.”

Today Tim exudes increased energy. He works out six times a week with weights, walking, and yard work. He no longer craves carbs. And his wife’s thrilled she no longer lives with a snoring, overweight husband.

Let’s be real. To burn fat, you need to eat lean protein, leafy vegetables, and plenty of fiber and good fats. You need to combine burst training with weight resistance. And you need to eliminate common food sensitivities like dairy and gluten.

But just as importantly for fast fat loss, you need seven to nine hours of quality, uninterrupted sleep every night.

To better understand how Tim attained fast fat loss, I’m going to walk you through the opposite scenario when you don’t get adequate quality sleep.

Let’s say last night you had a fight with your boyfriend and then work deadlines plagued your thoughts as you hit the pillow around 10:30. After what seems like an eternity of tossing and turning, you glance at your alarm clock: 2:57. Dammit.

Sleep deprivation negatively impacts many hormones. It increases your fat-storing insulin, for instance, and reduces muscle-building, fat-burning human growth hormone (HGH).

But let’s focus on the three hormones Dr. Barot mentioned.

A sleep-deprived morning means ghrelin, a hormone that commands your brain to eat now, will be in overdrive. Leptin sends the opposite message: this hormone tells your brain to put your fork down. Problem is, when you don’t sleep well, your brain doesn’t quite get that message.

Cortisol is your stress hormone that breaks down muscle and stores fat. You already raised your cortisol when you fought with your boyfriend and stressed over your work deadline, and lack of sleep keeps cortisol elevated.

Chronically elevated cortisol levels burn up B vitamins that help make sleep-inducing neurotransmitters. Cortisol also lowers your feel-good hormone serotonin that eventually converts to melatonin for good sleep. Can you see how you’re setting yourself up for sleep-deprivation disaster?

So now it’s 7:30 a.m. and you’re at Starbucks ordering a venti dark roast to get your caffeine fix. Because your brain is getting mixed signals from out-of-whack hormones, you’ll probably also order a low-fat blueberry muffin.

Despite a temporary caffeine jolt, that coffee’s not doing you any favors. Just one cup, for instance, can raise cortisol levels 30% for an hour. And caffeine can elevate cortisol levels in your blood for 18 hours.

Elevated cortisol levels combined with a blood sugar crash around 10 a.m. will leave you running for the bagel cart and another large coffee. So begins your miserable, carb-and-caffeine fueled day.

Then you discover you’re still revved up at 10 p.m. even though you only got three hours’ sleep the night before. That’s because caffeine’s half life is 12 hours, which means that 3 p.m. latte you devoured is still sticking around to steal your sleep.

Take control. Keep your single cup of coffee during the morning, and if you find it disturbs your sleep, dump it for green tea.

Remember you need to prepare for sleep, just like you warm up before strenuous exercise. Use the hour before bed as your power-down hour. Cut off Letterman, shut down your laptop, and take a hot bath with chamomile tea. Before long, you might notice those seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep trigger fast fat loss just like they did with Tim.

Sources:

http://www.kens5.com/news/national/Man-sleeps-away-pounds-135790688.html