Eat Stop Eat is an extremely easy and flexible lifestyle that promotes weight loss and a lean healthy body through the combination of intermittent fasting and resistance training.
To make Eat Stop Eat even more effective, concentrate on improving your quality of sleep. Going to bed later and later seems to be a hallmark of today’s modern society.
Even though sleep deprivation in rodents has been shown to result in death, it wasn’t until recently that we have discovered that lack of sleep can have serious negative effects on human health - including our ability to lose weight, and even our risk of certain diseases.
Research performed in Belgium in 2003 by Spiegel et al. measured sleep and 24-hour hormonal profiles in 11 healthy young males after 6 days of sleep restriction and after 6 days of sleep recovery.
At the end of sleep restriction, researchers noticed abnormalities in sleep patterns that are usually observed in depression. Sleep restriction was associated with increased cortisol levels in late afternoon and evening hours.
Many of the changes found during the sleep restriction period were very similar to those observed during aging and sometimes during depression!
The bottom line is that lack of sleep is experienced by a substantial part of the population in modern societies and is likely to increase the severity of depression and widespread age-related chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
Another major issue with lack of sleep is the simple fact that less time sleeping means more time awake, which typically also means more time eating.
My advice is as follows – Get to bed early (sleeping in doesn’t help). Adding this one improvement to your Eat Stop Eat lifestyle will greatly improve your health and your mood during the day.
Sleep is an important part of ANY weight loss or muscle building program. And beyond that it is important for your daily energy levels and your overall quality of life.
The old saying ‘work hard, play hard’ is missing a couple pieces.
It should be ‘work hard, play hard, sleep well’.
