Burn Fat While You Sleep

If you’re havin

g trouble sleeping, chances are you’re also living with a broken metabolism.

But repairing your ability to sleep soundly through the night can help you melt away unwanted pounds – without lifting a finger.

In a study published in the Journal of Lipid Research, researchers from Penn State University linked sleep-wake cycles to your native ability to burn fat while you rest.

Fifteen participants – all healthy men in their 20s – started the study by sleeping for 10 hours a night in their own homes. Then they spent 10 nights at Penn State’s clinical research center.

While there, they were fed carb-heavy meals – and slept no more than five hours for four consecutive nights.

During this stage, the participants reported feeling sluggish and less satisfied with the meals they ate. Unsurprisingly, they also gained weight.

The researchers took blood samples from the participants and found that their insulin levels rose as sleep restrictions worsened.

But when the participants were able to return to a 10-hour sleep schedule, they were able to return to their normal body weight.1

This study highlights just how connected your sleep schedule is to your fat-burning potential.

But the effects of a poor night’s sleep go beyond just physiological. Putting off sleep can also encourage behaviors that lead to further weight gain.

Another study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that when people get less sleep, they’re more likely to take a trip to the kitchen for a late-night snack. When this happens, your body releases cortisol – a stress hormone that encourages your body to conserve as much energy as it can.

In other words, instead of burning fat the way it should – you’re just sitting on unused energy. This is the perfect storm for unwanted weight gain.2

If you’re experiencing random hunger episodes in the middle of the night, I don’t blame you…

Because the modern world has set us all up for failure.

How The Modern World Keeps You Awake

The idea of a midnight snack is only something that could happen in modern times. For the vast majority of human history, eating when the sun went down was almost unheard of.

Picture yourself living among our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

There are no streetlights or sprawling metropolises brightening the night sky. There are no screens demanding constant attention. And the campfire you share with your community does little more than light up your immediate surroundings.

In those times, if you wanted to eat, you had to either track down a wild animal yourself or find something edible close to your settlement. During the blackened hours of the night, this is almost impossible.

That’s why hunting, gathering, and every other step in food preparation were done during the day – when you could see your surroundings and what you were doing.

Of course, our ancestors were not only preparing food, they were trying to avoid becoming food for something else.

In short, humans evolved to eat during the day. And in today’s world of near-constant illumination, we are fighting against our own biology. Unwanted weight gain is just one of many consequences.

Sleep problems are also getting worse.

According to the National Institutes of Health, between 50 and 70 million Americans have sleep disorders. That’s one out of every three adults.3

Fortunately, you can begin to solve both problems by turning to nature.

Here are some tips I share with my patients to help them repair their native metabolism – so they can burn fat while they sleep.

3 Ways To Burn Fat While You Sleep

  1. Limit artificial light. The screens you stare at all day – your smartphone, your computer, your television, and almost every other electronic device emits blue light. Studies show this type of light interferes with your body’s natural ability to produce melatonin – the “shut-eye” chemical that helps you sleep.Eliminating screens from your life entirely is almost impossible. But there are ways to adapt so that you can keep your exposure to a healthy minimum.Start by keeping your bedroom as dark as possible during the night. Darkness encourages melatonin production. Don’t turn on the TV past a certain time. If you enjoy reading before bedtime, opt for a traditional book instead of a tablet. If you can’t get your bedroom completely dark, try a sleep mask.
  2. Use high-quality melatonin supplements. Melatonin does more than make you sleepy. Recently, it’s been discovered that “the sleepy chemical” acts as a mitochondrial decoupler. This means that the melatonin being absorbed into your system has a protective effect on the “batteries” in your body’s cells, and encourages them to be more active.It helps your body remove damaged mitochondria, as well as help transport protons across the inner membranes in your cells…which burns calories.4Melatonin supplements can be found in almost any drug store or convenience store, but not all of them will absorb into your system properly. That’s why I recommend shopping for sprays, drops, or sublingual tablets.

    They’re easier to absorb and get to work faster.

  3. Try intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting doesn’t mean starving yourself. It means reorienting your body to process food the way human beings evolved to.Our hunter-gatherer ancestors often fasted out of necessity, routinely fluctuating between feasting and famine depending on how successful a hunt was – or the resources they had access to. Fasting is a primal tradition – and it helped our ancestors develop the fat-burning potential they needed to remain fit.It encourages your body to process food during the waking hours of the day and allows you to rest at night when you’re supposed to.

    I recommend starting with a simple, safe fasting schedule:

    1. Start your day with a 10 a.m. breakfast
    2. Take lunch in the afternoon as you normally would
    3. Finish your dinner by 6 p.m.
    4. Eat no additional food from 6 p.m. until 10 a.m. the following morning

To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD, CNS

References:

  1. Ness K, et al. “Four nights of sleep restriction suppress the postprandial lipemic response and decrease satiety.” J of Lipid Res. 2019;60(11):1935-1945.
  2. Nedeltcheva, A. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, January 2009.
  3. “Sleep Health | NHLBI, NIH.” Www.nhlbi.nih.gov, www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/education-and-awareness/sleep-health#:~:text=About%2050%20to%2070%20million.
  4. Demine S, et al. “Mitochondrial uncoupling: A key controller of biological processes in physiology and disease.” Cells. 2019;8(8):795