Here is what i’ve noticed. My training sessions can get quite late, and I sometimes have to get up early. The latest I finish is 9pm, the earliest I start is 8am. It used to be later / earlier, but I realised I had to sleep more. So I just cut down expenses, and worked less (yes people, that is also a solution).
However! Even with an 11:30pm-6am sleep cycle, it still seriously messes up my appetite during the day.
How do I know this? If you have been reading any of my previous articles, I try to keep track of sleep because i already know how valuable it is. The more I sleep the better I do, the less I sleep the worse I do. But only recently have I been tracking down calories for a weightloss challenge I’ve been doing. And here is what I found out :
Having a bad night sleep (less than 60% on the sleep cycle app) makes me eat about 800kcal more during the day. Yes 800kcal difference between a good nights sleep and a bad one. As I average 2800kcal per day, that is a HUGE difference. That is an extra full chocolate tablet I feel like stuffing in my mouth per day.
Willpower sucks. So figuring that I’ll just not eat it won’t help. I know my brain will trick me and I’ll subtly cheat myself into eating those extra deliciously unhealthy calories that my evil gut biome is dictating I should eat.
Yeah, you might think you can function normally on very little sleep. Especially when you watch Arnold Swarzenegger give a speech on some Epic music, believe you’re going to wake up tomorrow and eat the whole world up. But my guess is you might achieve that for two days, maybe even two weeks and then your life crumbles… you suddenly get ill when you thought you had it all under control. Argh… So unlucky.. no its not. You just went to hard.
Sleeps resolves these issues in multiple ways. First of all your willpower goes up. That is very helpful. Your blood sugar levels stabilise, because your insulin sensitivity is better. So you don’t wake up with the blood parameters of a pre diabetic. Your mood is better, which goes hand in hand with the fact that you’re less tired, less hypoglycemic, and less hungry because your leptin levels are higher, so you eat less.
So if you can’t seem to control what you eat, try more sleep and let me know how it goes.
Take it easy,
Morgan.