Working on Weight? Sleep On It

Hi Byte Wellness Fam!

How are you feeling?

I feel grateful. This week, I’ve been meditating on the idea that everything happens in its season and for a reason. That thing that happens to look like a set-back just might give you what you need to bounce-back. Don’t make me start to preach, now…

Seriously, all this talk about energy, metabolism, and health is a reminder that opportunities to boost our well-being are EVERYWHERE, even where they’re least-expected.

This week, in the #PhyteWellWednesday Workshop, we pinpointed an overlooked wellness resource. Our huge takeaway was: we can use the natural fast that happens during sleep to help us manage our weight. Speaking of fasts, make sure to weigh in on the discussion question below before you keep reading.

Discussion Question

When you think about going on a “diet” what type of eating comes to mind?
This one spurred an interesting conversation in the text thread. Folks had all types of answers, including the notorious 18:6 variation on intermittent fasting. What’s yours?

Ideally, whether we're working to manage our weight or lower other health risks, we don't have to resort to off-and-on "diets".

As counterintuitive as it may sound, we're most likely to reach our health and wellness goals and enjoy our lives if we can find sustainable ways to live...patterns and habits that we can maintain everyday without much strain.

Check the recording from this week's workshop below.

Tune into next week’s live workshop to get more insight into how our habits boost our health.

Not getting the #PhyteWellWednesday Workshop invites?

Send TEXT to 1(224)302-6224 to get daily wellness texts PLUS weekly workshop invites.

What’s Sleep Got to Do With It?

Listen, getting quality sleep helps us maintain a healthy weight in lots of ways:

Adequate sleep helps us balance hormones like leptin and ghrelin that control appetite and metabolism. That means we won’t feel the need to overeat, and our body isn’t inclined to store more energy than it should.

Adequate sleep also helps us balance our immune system and block chronic inflammation. That means we’re in a better position to fight off the toxic, disease-causing deep belly fat (also known as visceral fat).

Those are just a couple ways our nightly sleep habit helps us with weight and health. But, there’s more.

What do you think is the simplest thing sleep does to help us maintain a healthy weight?

It gives us calorie-free time! When we’re sleeping, we’re not eating. It’s that simple.

Sleep As Intermittent Fasting

In this week’s Workshop, we talked about how the body needs fasting (calorie-free) time in order to boost the pancreatic hormone glucagon and start unlocking our stored energy. That’s the first step in getting rid of unhealthy fat.

After 3-4 hours of not eating or drinking anything with calories, our body starts to look for energy. First, it breaks down our glycogen (layers of linked sugar stored in the liver and skeletal muscles).

It takes about 12-24 hours of not eating or drinking calories for most people to use all of our glycogen. The 8-9 hours we spend sleeping (not eating) are prime hours to break down glycogen.

If we are still eating/drinking fewer calories than we need, our body senses that it needs to unlock MORE stored energy.

With all of our glycogen gone, we start breaking down stored fat and/or muscle for energy.

That’s the main mechanism that connects intermittent fasting to weight loss (whether we’re talking 18:6 fasting or 5:2 fasting, or the “fasting-mimicking diet” any other version of the popular eating pattern).

Do you see how fasting during sleep is a form of intermittent fasting that primes us to burn that toxic deep belly (visceral) fat?

Quick recap:

The 8-9 hours of sleep-fasting trigger a glycogen breakdown.
That gives us a head start on burning energy (ideally visceral fat) for the rest of day.

Can you see why I’m convinced that the natural fast during sleep is one of THE most overlooked weight-loss hacks?

Fasting for 8-9 hours while we’re awake could feel unbearable for lots of folks. That’s one of the reasons intermittent fasting diets have a higher quit-rate than eating patterns that simply cut calories or improve food quality.

But, while we’re sleeping, we don’t mind that we’re not eating. Fasting during sleep isn’t only bearable…it’s what we’re used to.

Okay, so we’ve discovered a great weight management hack. How can we make the most of it?

Ways to Maximize The Energy-Burning Potential of Sleep

Think about maximizing this natural fasting time.

It’s a short reach to extend the energy-burning potential of our 8-9 hour sleep-fast by building a fasting buffer around sleep.

For example, if we make sure that in the 2 hours before bed and 2 hours after waking, we aren’t eating or drinking calories our 9-hour sleep-fast into a 12-13 hour fasting window.

That means, we’re more likely to burn through glycogen storage and enter fat-burning mode before our late-breakfast or lunch that next day.

Habits that can interfere with energy-burning during and after sleep:

Late-night snacking (eating dessert or drinking something with calories right before bed)
Mid-sleep snacking (waking up in the middle of the night to eat, then going back to sleep)
Early-morning sugary drinks (think coffee or tea with creamer or sugar added)
Eating a high-sugar, high-starch breakfast (waffles, pancakes, bread, etc) first thing after waking

There are so many more ideas where those came from. What are some eating and drinking habit shifts you can make in order to boost your energy-burning potential?

Fasting and Exercise

***If you made it this far, you earned this pro-tip.

Pre-breakfast time (after the sleep fast) might be the most effective time to workout if your goal is to burn fat.

Remember those things called myokines (hormones from muscle) that are released when we exercise?

Myokine research, including a placebo-controlled trial in the Journal of Cell Metaoblism found that a myokine called IL-6 (yes, the same chemical known as immune-related cytokine, IL-6) plays an essential role in burning toxic visceral fat during exercise.

We release more fat-burning IL-6 during with exercise when: