Insomnia and How it Affects Weight Loss
This is another area that can stop fat burning cold. If you struggle getting to sleep, staying asleep or both, or have restless, un-refreshing sleep, you will need a lot of luck losing fat. Many don’t realize that most of the body’s fat burning happens while you sleep, so if you aren’t sleeping, you aren’t losing. We work closely to identify where the cause of the sleep problem is and the develop a strategy for improving this naturally.
In a study to be published in the May issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, Sarosh Motivala, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and colleagues looked at two hormones that are primarily responsible for regulating the body’s energy balance, telling the body when it is hungry and when it is full.
The study found that chronic insomnia disrupts one of these two hormones.
To date, no study has evaluated nocturnal levels of the two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, in primary insomnia patients.
Ghrelin, a peptide secreted by the stomach, stimulates appetite and increases before meals. Leptin, which affects body weight and is secreted primarily by fat cells, signals the hypothalamus regarding the degree of fat storage in the body; decreased leptin tells the body there is a calorie shortage and promotes hunger, while increased levels promote energy expenditure. In the study, researchers compared healthy sleepers with those suffering from chronic insomnia and measured the levels of the two hormones at various times throughout the night. They found that while leptin levels averaged out over the night to be roughly the same between the two groups, levels of ghrelin were 30 percent lower in insomnia sufferers.
On the face of it, a decreased level of ghrelin would seem to inhibit weight gain; it is an increase in ghrelin, after all, that stimulates appetite. But Motivala compared his findings with other, earlier studies on sleep deprivation and speculates that a switch may occur during the day: Sleep loss leads to increased ghrelin and decreased leptin, a “double whammy” that stimulates appetite.
“The current study shows that insomnia patients have a dysregulation in energy balance that could explain why these patients gain weight over time.”
Our goal is to help fix your insomnia. I have worked with so many patients on this very same problem with great success. One thing that is not addressed in this study is adrenal gland burn out / exhaustion. Your adrenal glands play a big role in how well you sleep, your blood sugar levels, your afternoon energy etc….. One of the main glands that we focus on supporting and helping you make changes to repair it, is the adrenal gland. By doing this, you can sleep better, have more energy and lose weight.