Normally when you’re trying to lose weight you have to give up on certain foods like sugar and junk and eat more healthy foods like veggies, complex carbs, and lean proteins. Another factor you should include in that list is getting enough sleep. So when you don’t get enough sleep it affects your diet. According to experts, if you want to lose weight you need to get a good night’s rest. Getting enough rest helps to restore your body both physically and mentally. Most people sleep from between 6-8 hours or 7-9 which is the ideal sleeping duration.

However, this all depends on each person’s unique physiology. If you don’t get enough sleep you tend to start gaining weight and it becomes difficult for you to lose weight because you will tend to eat more. Poor sleep also leaves you stressed which makes it harder for you to control your appetite.

Sleep controls your diet

Every time you hear people talking about achieving a healthy weight, it always revolves around what you eat and how much you move. So if you want to have a healthy weight eat less and move more, but sometimes it’s not that simple. This can be affected by your lifestyle, work, exercise, and getting enough sleep. Not many people sleep the number of hours they’re supposed to which affects their diet and fitness efforts. Sleeping less than 7 hours every night can make all your dieting efforts go to waste.

Sleep interferes with your gym time

Lack of enough sleep not only affects your diet but your exercise time. Regardless of what your fitness goals are, having body muscle is important.  Muscle helps you burn fat and stay young, but lack of sleep decreases your body’s ability to make muscle which causes muscle loss increasing your chances of getting injuries. When you don’t get enough sleep your body isn’t able to recover after exercising because it slows down the production of the growth hormone which is also responsible for anti-aging.

Reasons why you need enough sleep

1. Your brain is able to focus

Your brain functions differently when you don’t get enough sleep. When you’re tired, the part of your brain that is involved with inhibition and behavior control is lowered which causes you to overeat. Skipping out on sleep makes you respond differently to food. You’re more likely to choose unhealthy food over healthy food. A well-rested body and brain help you to make better choices when it comes to the kind of food you eat.

2. You’re able to burn more calories

According to studies, the amount of calories you burn when you’re resting is 5% more than someone who is tired. You also burn 20% more calories after eating than someone who hasn’t had a restful night of sleep. After a good night’s sleep, you not only burn some calories in your sleep you also wake up with lots of energy to take you through the day.

3. Helps stimulate your metabolism

There is a connection between sleeping in a cool bedroom, a good night sleep, and weight loss. Sleeping in a cool bedroom in a comfortable loft bed can help you fall asleep much faster and sleep better without waking up in the middle of the night. A cool sleeping environment stimulates your metabolism which means your body needs to burn more calories to keep you warm at night. According to studies, a colder sleeping environment stimulates the production of brown and beige fats that burn calories and protects the health of your metabolic system. Beige and brown fats are thinning fats that burn calories instead of storing them.

Maintaining cool temperatures in your bedroom affects the quality and quantity of sleep you get each night. Sleeping in warm temperatures will increase the number of times you wake up at night because of sweating thus reducing the quality of sleep you get. A cool bedroom, on the other hand, makes it easier to fall asleep and sleep soundly which helps in weight loss.

4. Help enhance your physical activity

Lack of enough sleep can cause you to have daytime fatigue, you don’t have the energy or drive to exercise. And if you push yourself to exercise you will get tired sooner rather than later. When you’re sleep-deprived the amount of intense workout your body can handle drastically drops. However, with a proper night’s rest, your athletic performance will improve which means your accuracy increases, your reaction time improves, you become faster, and fatigue decreases.

5. Helps to prevent insulin resistance

Insulin is a hormone that transports sugar through your bloodstream to your body cells for energy. When you don’t sleep properly your cells can become resistant to insulin causing more sugar to remain in your bloodstream. This makes your body to compensate by increasing the production of insulin in your body which makes you feel hungrier signaling your body to store calories as fats. Insulin resistance can lead to weight gain and Type 2 diabetes.

6. Helps stop late night snacking

The longer you stay awake the more likely you’re to eat more food than your body needs which will cause you to gain weight within a short time. You need the energy to stay awake at night so if you have the tendency of sleeping late at night you will snack more and it will be mostly on unhealthy foods.

7. It boosts fat loss

If you’re not getting enough sleep it doesn’t matter if you’re on a diet, you will most likely not reduce the amount of fat you should if you slept properly. Sleeping at least eight hours every night has been shown to help in reducing a significant amount of fat.

Final word

Sleep is something that happens naturally and something we all take for granted because you think you will be fine without getting enough. The fact is proper sleep is very much related to your overall health including weight loss. Lack of proper sleep can slow down your body’s process of burning fat which will frustrate your efforts in losing weight. Get a good night’s sleep and you will achieve your weight-loss goals with greater ease.