Sleep is the foundation of a productive, positive day.
A person that has suffered the inconvenience of poor sleep caused by a newborn child, a racing mind, overbearing work schedule or even noisy neighbours will attest to that.
No matter your reasons for poor sleep or a lack of sleep there are some significant impacts it can have on your nutrition habits or your ability to stick to a new eating protocol whatever that may be.
If you want to know how you may be able to increase your sleep quality or duration I’ll point you in the direction of Dr. Matthew Walker whose book “Why We Sleep” was the source of the information I’ll share with you today.
1. Poor Sleep Makes You Hungry
When you are underslept a hormone called Leptin will be found in higher concentrations in your body.
What is Leptin? It’s your hunger hormone. It signals the brain to let you know you should eat.
If this is found in higher concentrations you’ll find yourself feeling hungrier which can lead to overeating. By how much? I’ll get to that soon.
2. Poor Sleep Reduces Satiety
Another hormone called Ghrelin will signal when we are full or satiated by a meal.
This is reduced when we are underslept and therefore we become less satisfied by our meals when we are underslept.
While the same meal on a good night’s sleep is filling and satisfies your hunger levels, while underslept it leaves you wanting more.
Now, the brass tacks. How much more do we consume when sleep deprived?
3. You Eat More
A sleep deprived person may consume 300 calories more per day.
Doesn’t seem like much, right?
A pound of body fat contains 3500 calories so even 12 days of over consumption can lead to an increase in body fat.
Spread this over a year or more and the result can be a significantly increased waist line and risk of ill health.
I’m sure we’ve all eaten something “to keep us going”. The truth is we burn very few extra calories while awake when underslept.
We become lazy, lethargic and may be awake for more hours but it’s been shown underslept people do a lot less in those extra hours due to tiredness. Makes sense!
4. You Eat More Junk
When tired, not only do we feel hungrier, our brains are now hardwired to want high sugar, high fat junk foods like pizza, cookies, sweets and crisps.
When underslept the part of our brain that controls judgement and decision making is silenced in the words of Walker.
So saying “fuck it” and eating a whole pack of cookies when shattered isn’t a personality issue it’s a brain chemistry issue.
There’s an excuse you never knew you needed!
There are also more endocannabinoids in our system as as the name suggests, similar to cannabis, will increase our desire to snack. The munchies in other words.
5. Poor Sleep Increases Stress
Lack of sleep is a stressor for the body. Our figh or flight nervous system is triggered. We get tetchy and find ourselves with a fuse that’s shorter than usual or patience that wears thun quickly.
How does this affect food intake?
When our stress hormone cortisol is high our digestive activity is suppressed.
This is because our body can’t tell the source of stress it just reacts to a stressor. If you were being chased by a polar bear (I’m cold as I write this) your body won’t want to waste energy digesting lunch. It will direct energy to other systems that need it such as your muscular system for running g the fuck away.
Because lack of sleep means elevated cortisol even when we eat healthily we may struggle to efficiently absorb nutrients from this food.
It may also cause a backlog, no pun intended.
The answer to all these issues?
Getting 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night.
Easier said than done, I know. I’ll offer some tips on how to encourage better sleep in another post.
Now…..go asleep!
Mark
markcaulfieldcoaching.ie 
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