You Snooze, You Lose

If you're not sleeping enough, you could be at risk for obesity, diabetes, and a host of other troubles. While you're asleep, your body is restoring your energy, resetting your metabolism, and strengthening your immune system. Sleep is the key to being healthy, trim and, fit! In fact, new research has proven that it's possible to lose weight by simply getting enough sleep. Studies show that people who sleep less than four hours a night are nearly 75 percent more likely to be obese than those who get a full night's rest. Do you want to be slim, healthy, and well-rested? This comprehensive three-week program will help you optimize your sleep for maximum health and weight-loss results.

With Sleep Away The Pounds, you'll get:

• Relaxation techniques to reduce stress and make your nights more restful
• A sleep-well menu plan that tells you what to eat-and when
• Sleep strategies for getting more and better sleep-including solutions for insomnia and sleep disorders
• A super-slimming, low-impact, sleep-enhancing exercise program.

Don't Wait. Curl Up, Relax, and Start Losing Tonight with... Sleep Away The Pounds

Chapter 1

Do you want to be healthy, trim, energetic, and vibrant? You can, with a weight loss secret that's been right under our noses all along. Sleep. That's right. The very thing many of us don't do enough turns out to be key to staying slim.

We may be tempted to think that staying up late will help us burn up more calories and speed our weight loss. But sleep researchers say that this isn't so. Actually, we typically burn a limited number of calories - say, only about fifty in several hours - in the late evening. And we may think that if we cut our sleep short and get up extra early to go to the gym, we'll see the scale move in the right direction. Yet the harder we work out, the more discouraged we can sometimes become, as we remain stuck at a weight plateau. Some of us search for the magic bullet that will help us get rid of those last ten pounds, but it continues to elude us.

Could a good night's sleep be the missing ingredient? Sleep does indeed emerge as an important piece of the weight control puzzle, according to Stanford University sleep researcher Dr. Emmanuel Mignot. He states, "Most people think that sleeping too much contributes to making people fat, but we found the opposite is true." According to a number of research studies, sleep turns out to be as important to staying in shape as going to the gym, cutting calories, and eating right.

In our frenzy to experience it all, get it all done, manage our universe, and not let a moment escape us, we're missing out on one of life's necessities - a good night's sleep. "We're shifting to a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," says Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting our weight and our health, and it appears to be a significant factor.

People are the only animals to voluntarily ignore their sleep needs. We've learned to disregard our body's messages when we're tired and needing sleep. We stay up late to work, play, read, socialize, or watch television. Endocrinologist Eve Van Cauter, PhD, who directs the Research Laboratory on Sleep, Chronobiology, and Neuro-endocrinology at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, says, "We're overstepping the boundaries of our biology because we are not wired for sleep deprivation." She adds, "We know the obesity epidemic is due to overeating - too big portions, too much rich food, and too little activity - but why do we crave too much of these rich foods?" Maybe, she says, it's because "we are sleep-deprived and unable to curb our appetites."

Did you know there are hormones that make you hungry and hormones that control your appetite? It's true, and research shows they are significantly influenced by how much sleep you get. Here's what studies have revealed:

Five major appetite-influencing hormones can get out of whack when you don't get enough sleep, which significantly affects how much food you eat.

When you are sleep-deprived, your metabolism can really suffer, which causes weight gain.

Appetite-suppressing hormones and appetite-stimulating hormones are best regulated when you get seven to nine hours of sleep per night.

You won't tend to crave high-calorie, carbohydrate-rich foods nearly as much when you get adequate, refreshing sleep.

Sufficient sleep will help you manage your blood sugar more effectively, which helps you manage your appetite. Even one week of sleep deprivation can set off a temporary diabetic effect, causing you to crave sugar and other fattening foods.

Sleeping in a few extra minutes has its advantages. Research shows that if you increase your sleep by just thirty minutes per night, your chances of losing weight go up exponentially.

If you've thought sleeping was a waste of time, you don't need to feel guilty ever again. When you've finished this chapter, you'll realize it's not only very important to staying in shape, but also crucial to staying healthy. By paying attention to your sleep needs, you can be on your way to losing the weight you want - starting tonight. The entire Sleep Away the Pounds Program is dedicated to helping you get the best sleep possible so you can control the hormones that cause you to want to eat more than you should, curb your cravings for sugar and other fattening foods, balance your blood sugar, jump-start your metabolism, and begin losing weight right away.

Throw Out Your Diet Bars and Grab Your Pillow

Have you noticed that when you don't get enough sleep, you want to eat more? Sometimes a whole lot more. It may be time to ask yourself if those nights burning the midnight oil might be altering your metabolism.

Research has shown that sleep-deprived people do indeed eat more food, and they often choose the most fattening fare. "During nights of sleep deprivation, you feel that your eating goes wacky," says Dr. Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry specializing in sleep research at Harvard. "Up at 2 am, working on a paper, a steak or pasta is not very attractive. You'll grab the candy bar instead. It probably has to do with the glucose regulation going off. It could be that a good chunk of our epidemic of obesity is actually an epidemic of sleep deprivation."

Is there a correlation between the 65 percent of Americans who are overweight and the 63 percent who, according to the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, DC, say they don't get the recommended eight hours of sleep per night? A growing number of sleep researchers assert that there is.

Since the mid-1960s, the rate of obesity in the United States has nearly tripled, to one in three adults. Over the same period, the US population has deducted, on average, more than an hour from their nightly slumber. We've lost about two hours of sleep since 1910, when the average person slept nine hours a night. According to the National Sleep Foundation, people in the United States now sleep an average of 6.9 hours on weeknights and 7.5 hours on weekends.

A whopping one-third of our population sleeps 6.5 or fewer hours nightly - far less than the 8 hours that many sleep specialists recommend. Physician Will Wilkoff, MD, author of Is My Child Overtired?, says the number of overtired patients he sees has soared in the twenty-five years he has been in practice, because families are trying "to squeeze 28 hours of living into 24."

Groundbreaking research is showing that there is a correlation between the lack of sleep so many Americans are experiencing and the weight gain that is plaguing our nation. "We've known that people use food as a pick-me-up when they are tired, but now it appears they are hungrier than we realized, and there is a hormonal basis for their eating," says Thomas Wadden, director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Columbia University studied the sleep habits of 3,682 people and found that those who got by on less than four hours of sleep a night were 73 percent more likely to be obese than those who slept seven to nine hours nightly. Those catching a modest six hours of sleep a night were 23 percent more likely to be obese. Other studies report that reducing sleep to 6.5 or fewer hours for successive nights causes potentially harmful metabolic, hormonal, and immune changes that can lead to illnesses and diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

It's plain to see that getting plenty of refreshing sleep on a consistent basis, and enough sleep to meet your body's needs, could be far better for your weight loss goals than eating a diet bar for lunch every day, and just as important as working out and eating right.

Copyright © 2007 by Cherie Calbom and John Calbom

Tags: Diets and Weight Loss, Sleep

About the Author

Cherie Calbom is known to millions of fans as "The Juice Lady," and her infomercials are world-renowned. A registered nutritionist, Cherie Calbom has become one of America's foremost celebrity experts on "drinking your vitamins." Her previous books, Juicing for High Level Wellness and Vibrant Good Looks (Crown, 1999), and Juice Lady's Guide to Juicing for Life (Avery, 1992).

About the Author

John Calbom, MA, is director of Trinity Retreat House and vice president of Trinity Wellness Institute. He is a behavioral medicine specialist, organizational development consultant, Eastern Orthodox priest, and coauthor of The Complete Cancer Cleanse.