The Importance of Sleep in Weight Loss and Metabolic Health

Let’s talk about how your sleep supports your metabolic health. If you want to dive deeper into metabolic function and how your sleep shares a significant relationship with your metabolism, this article is for you. I hope you find it helpful.

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Table of Contents

What Is Metabolic Health?
The Costs of Poor Sleep
The Root Causes of Poor Sleep
Practical Strategies to Improve Your Sleep
Sweet Dreams for Your Metabolic Health

What Is Metabolic Health?

When your metabolic health is at its best, this is where your blood sugar, cholesterol, and body weight are balanced. There are low levels of disease risk, fairly steady blood sugar levels (meaning brain and energy levels stay steady and strong), and things are working well.

Your body is able to burn fuel appropriately and store fuel as needed — without storing excessive amounts of fuel that are beyond your needs. The exciting thing is that a lot of new data suggests that sleep can play a big role here.

We know that this relates to sleep’s hormonal effects on the body. Things like insulin, cortisol, and growth hormone are regulated by our sleep cycles. And all of these are on what’s known as a circadian rhythm — meaning we make different amounts throughout the day.

Think about how radically different your mind works when you are wide awake compared to when you’re deep asleep or first getting up. This is your circadian pattern, and when you don’t have good sleep it can disrupt this pattern and rhythm in a bunch of ways.

The Costs of Poor Sleep

Poor sleep is also a trigger for things like:

• Diabetes
• Fatty liver
• Heart disease

The reason is that sleep is when your body does most of its energy regulation. Specifically, your liver can take glucose and make that into glycogen.

That process involves taking a healthy carbohydrate in the diet and making it into a form that our liver stores. That’s great because we use it for fuel and for our brain to function properly.

We also need stored glucose to burn fat. We can’t burn dietary fat effectively if we have too little glycogen in the liver. In fact, when we have too little glycogen, the fat builds up and results in what we know as fatty liver disease. This further worsens metabolism.

When sleep is not right, ghrelin also goes up and leptin goes down. This causes our drive for food to become out of range for what our body really needs. Basically, we get cravings that we don’t need and our bodies don’t want.

There are also plenty of other vicious cycles that occur when we get poor sleep. We get more tired and our fatigue is worse, and we don’t want to do things like exercise.

So we get stuck in this cycle of:

• Less physical activity
• More low-grade fatigue and depression
• Disordered eating and changes in food preferences

What I want you to know for today’s article is that these are things that can be brought under control. If you feel like you’re stuck in this cycle, there are tangible ways that we can break out of it and get back to feeling our best — so let’s dive into that piece.

The Root Causes of Poor Sleep

Let’s start by assessing some key factors that can contribute to poor sleep. One is stress and chronic stressors. These are especially tricky when they disrupt cortisol.

When we have a normal stress response, we have cortisol in the morning that we shut off at night. But, if our stress response is too high (compounded by not enough time for sleep or poor quality sleep) our cortisol may never find a way to shut off. It stays on.

That puts our body into a mode of storage. We often think of terms like “fight or flight” when we hear about cortisol, but the other ‘F’ in the mix is “famine.” Our body acts as if it’s in a famine state, so we enter a sort of collection phase.

When these things occur on a long-term basis, we have a lot of evidence that this is a precursor to things like:

• Weight gain
• Metabolic syndrome
• Cardiovascular risks

Practical Strategies to Improve Your Sleep

If you want weight loss to be easier and improve your metabolism, your sleep is a great place to start. Let’s talk about some practical tips to help in that regard.

Waking Time

The first is getting consistent routines. You need to be doing the same things at about the same time of day, with the main ‘milestones’ or ‘rituals’ being:

• When you have your first meal
• When you wake up

The problem is that most of us have a workweek and we have a weekend. During the workweek, we may wake up earlier than we prefer. This might cause us to want to enjoy more time in the evening during our work days or our days off work.

This leads to people sleeping on weekends. And while I don’t want to take that away from you, it’s important to remember that your body doesn’t see a difference between the days of the week. It craves routine and stability, and when the weekends come we kind of throw it out of whack.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of routine. Your morning wake time is going to be so important, and it is critical to try and keep it consistent through the week and the weekend.

Light Exposure

If you get light in the morning, you’re effectively telling your brain “Hey, it’s time to get up.” But it’s not just flipping the switch from night to day — it can be about getting outdoors because the nature of light and intensity of it can’t be copied.

But if you live somewhere that it’s still dark when you wake up, it’s worth having ways to have artificial sunlight. This can take the form of light boxes of light visors that make light of a higher intensity that can try to mimic sunlight better.

Foods for Sleep

Another thing to consider is to incorporate foods that are good for sleep, specifically those that are high in magnesium. Some foods have been found to be high in melatonin and those with complex carbohydrates.

Some of the best ones for magnesium include:

• Almonds
• Pinto beans
• Spinach

Foods that are rich in melatonin include:

• Pistachios
• Cherries

Getting foods like these aren’t the same as taking a melatonin pill for sleep. They contain amounts that are higher than in pills, and they don’t spike your melatonin immediately — they offer a more gradual effect that can ease you into sleep later.

Let’s touch on complex carbohydrates before we list some examples. The trick here is that any time of day is fine for them, but you don’t want to skimp on them when evening arrives. If your diet is way too low on good carbs in the evening, your body has to expend cortisol to raise your glucose. This means getting more glucose in the forms of:

• Brown rice
• Squash
• Sweet potatoes
• Black beans

Vegetable starches, whole grains, beans, and legumes, are all sources of glucose. If you have a nice serving of those in the evening, it allows you to keep your cortisol low.

Sweet Dreams for Your Metabolic Health

Sleep quality matters, which is why it is so important to have a firm understanding of what is happening and what you need to do about it. And one thing I want you to consider is the role of your adrenals and how they tie into all of this.

I wrote the Adrenal Reset Diet to help with exactly that. I wrote this book to explain how you could use diet and timed carbohydrates to regain a good cortisol rhythm.

Another great resource is the Adrenal Quiz. This can help give you a strong start in understanding how your adrenals are functioning — completely for free.

Your sleep is a huge part of your metabolism and overall health. If you want to get back to feeling your best, in more ways than one, I hope you’ll consider visiting any of the resources above. Here’s to your best health and a solid night’s sleep!