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How does sleep impact metabolic rate and overall health?

In this episode of the Fitness Simplified podcast with Fitness & Nutrition Specialist Brooke Davis, we’ll delve into the profound relationship between sleep and metabolism.

Learn how sleep influences metabolic rate, hormone regulation, fat metabolism, and overall health while optimizing sleep quality and establishing a beneficial nighttime routine.

Tune in now for a concise guide to understanding and optimizing the vital connection between sleep and metabolism. Don’t miss out!

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Fitness Simplified podcast. I’m Brooke Davis, Women’s Fitness and Nutrition Specialist with [Elysian Women’s Wellness] and I’m here to simplify your fitness.

Metabolism refers to the body’s complex process of energy expenditure – how our bodies convert calories into energy that enables us to function. There are a lot of factors that affect our individual rate of metabolism, including body size, right? Larger bodies need more energy to function than smaller bodies do. Muscle mass, physical activity, and sleep.

In today’s episode, we are going to dive into how sleep actually affects your metabolism and in turn, fat loss. So going back into metabolism, physical activity has a big impact on individual energy expenditure. Exercising, being physically active, demands that our bodies expend additional energy, right? Or use calories rather than storing that energy as fat.

Sleep also affects individual metabolism. So getting sufficient high quality rest can help your body maintain its optimal metabolic rate for your age, make it easier to lose weight and keep from gaining weight. It can also help reduce your risk for diseases associated with weight gain.

Metabolism is most impacted by our genes, though, like our individual chronotop types, our individual metabolic types, slow, medium, or fast is actually determined by our DNA. That being said, from epigenetics, we know that our environment actually overrides any kind of gene definition of how our bodies present. Did you know, though, that 25% of the American population has been diagnosed with a sleep disorder? Many of us know how impossible it can feel at times to get a full night’s sleep, right? Hello, mom life.

But let’s talk about why it’s so important to try. A primary task for sleep is hormone regulation. There are two important hormones that sleep helps to regulate, and that is ghrelin and leptin.

Ghrelin handles your increases in appetite. I like to think of it as like a little gremlin. It’s hungry.

It makes you hungry. While leptin actually tells you when you’re full, okay, and they create satiation. So not getting enough sleep actually increases your production of ghrelin, that little gremlin hormone that stimulates your appetite and makes you more inclined to consume more calories.

This study specifically found a single night of short sleep, four and a half hours, elevated ghrelin levels, and significantly increased feelings of hunger the following day in healthy, normal weight men. Research also shows that lack of sufficient sleep reduces your levels of leptin, right? That fullness hormone, that appetite suppressant. And leptin sends an important message to the brain that we have consumed enough calories to meet your energy needs for the time being.

So not getting enough sleep reduces that signal, okay? This is key to nutrition and better decision-making regarding foods, right? So many people talk about needing willpower or discipline to reach their goals. And, you know, other studies have shown that discipline and willpower are actually used less by more successful people. And so what we want to do is set ourselves up for success to where we’re not needing to use so much discipline and willpower.

Our bodies just have the right signaling. Our hormones are telling us the right things because we’ve gotten enough sleep. Sleep deprivation can also affect your metabolism through impacting cortisol, which is our stress hormone.

So this is a major factor in weight loss and brain function, as well as other bodily functions like digestion, your immune system. So this 2019 study looked at the impact of short sleep on fat metabolism in a group of 15 healthy men over a period of 10 nights. Okay, this schedule that they did simulated a typical work week with insufficient sleep on consecutive weeknights.

This was done in a lab, and participants were given a high-fat, high-calorie meal at dinner, which was a bowl of chili mac and cheese. Sounds bomb, right? Okay, and for four consecutive nights, they were not allowed to sleep for more than five hours. Using blood tests, the researchers compared their metabolic response to the evening meal after their four sleep-deprived nights.

Then, they compared it to a well-rested response. They found that after those four nights of short sleep, the men showed a significant difference in their ability to break down fat specifically into energy with more fat being stored rather than used as fuel. A subsequent night of recovery sleep, right, typical of what you might get on the weekend after a long work week, it did improve your fat metabolism, their fat metabolism, to a degree, but it did not fully restore it to pre-sleep deprivation levels.

So, basically, it helped, but it didn’t bring it back up to their baseline. They also found that the men felt less full and satisfied after eating the heavy meal when they were sleep-deprived compared to when they were rested. And so, this goes back to their leptin hormones.

Their leptin had been reduced over that week of sleep, and so, it wasn’t sending the signals that it should have been that they were full and satisfied after eating that meal compared to when they had been rested. Another important hormone that sleep can trigger is the growth hormone. So, we read that cell generation and muscle repair happens during deep sleep.

This is a requirement for your body to recover after your workouts and to keep functioning and progressing properly, right? And beyond that, nobody likes to work out when you’re feeling exhausted, and that lack of recovery can ultimately lead to injury. So, essentially, if you’re not recovering, you can train all you want, but if you’re not sleeping and you’re not getting that recovery, you’re actually not getting the most out of your workouts. Not only are you not developing that growth hormone, your body’s not producing it, but you don’t have the regeneration that is needed to then rebuild the muscle that you have broken down in your workouts.

So, if you are constantly trading sleep for even training, right? If you’re getting up an hour earlier to go work out, but you’re not getting enough sleep regularly, it may actually behoove you to sleep in a little bit. You can tell your gym partner I said that. So, what does this actually mean for you? When you get a full night’s sleep, you wake up, you make a better breakfast choice.

This breakfast choice leads you to feeling better about yourself and happy to be that much closer to achieving your goals. This good night’s sleep also is providing you with the energy to go get a good workout in. Studies have shown that this workout will then help to combat depression and anxiety.

Your physical activity also releases that nasty pent-up cortisol hormone, which means you’re feeling less stressed. After your workout, you make another great meal choice to fuel your body and recover. You feel satiated and full because of it because your leptin hormones are at baseline where they should be.

And this workout also then leads you to another good night’s sleep because you’ve worked your body. It’s feeling good and it needs to rest. Thus, the wellness cycle of life continues to another day.

So, how can you actually improve your sleep? It’s so much easier said than done. Sometimes as a mama to a little one who doesn’t sleep well, I totally understand. Okay, but number one, create a routine.

Same thing every night, just like our kids. When you are reading about all the books to get ready for your baby, they tell you to create a bedtime routine. Okay, this helps prep their brain, your body, okay, for sleep, knowing what’s coming next.

Adults are no different. So, create your own routine. It doesn’t have to be super long, but just making sure that it’s setting you up for that relaxation and getting into bed.

Number two, no blue light at least one hour before bed. Studies show that this light disturbs our circadian rhythm, can actually cause a cortisol spike in the evening, which disrupts our sleep. We want our melatonin production and our cortisol production to be inverse.

And unfortunately, when our cortisol spikes due to this blue light close to bedtime, it decreases the amount of melatonin being released, which is our sleep hormone. So, at least one hour before bed, cut off your blue light, wear blue light blockers. And really, some studies say up to two hours.

So, one hour is at the minimum. Number three, no caffeine after 11 or 12. I don’t care if you think you can drink a cup of coffee, then fall asleep.

Okay, that is not beneficial to you. That’s not a badge of honor. That means that your adrenals are likely shot.

But studies show that your sleep is not as restful and your recovery will be hindered even if you fall back asleep. Okay, that caffeine, your body still has to process it. Okay, and thus the vicious cycle of then making you reach for more caffeine the next day continues.

Number four is to get morning sun. Melatonin production actually occurs in the morning and is helped by getting that sunlight to your eyeballs first thing. Number five is brain dump.

For all you ladies out there with these endless to-do lists, grab your journal and write down everything that’s going on in your head. Your to-do list for the next day, what you’re stressing about, whatever it is you need to get out of your head onto paper. This not only helps you organize your thoughts and have a plan of action, you literally clear your brain.

Okay, which makes everyone sleep better. And number six is to skip the nightcap. Okay, alcohol might make you feel drowsy.

It might feel like you’re winding down, but it also prevents you from entering deep sleep. It disrupts your sleep cycles and it also causes you to wake up in the middle of the night to go pee usually. So, skip the wine.

As far as your nighttime routine, some things that I really like to include are having essential oils going, some lavender if you’re into that. I just did this amazing blend. It was lavender and cedarwood and eucalyptus and it was so just warm and cozy.

I loved it. Doing some light stretching and some reading are some of my favorites. And then, of course, warm bath, warm shower.

Studies have shown that people actually fall asleep faster if you take a warm bath or shower prior to bedtime. So, I would love to hear some of your guys’ nighttime routines and what you took away from this. So, if you listened to this and it was helpful, feel free to screenshot, please share on social media, tag me, and let me know what you’re going to start doing to improving to improve your sleep.

I will see you guys next time. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Fitness Simplified Podcast. We’re stoked to have you join us on your journey to better health and fitness.

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Coach Brooke Davis Links:

Website: bdavistraining.com

LinkedIn: Brooke Davis – Owner – Davis Fitness

Facebook: Brooke Davis, CPT 

Instagram: Brooke Davis  (@brooke_elysian)

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