50 TOP TIPS FOR FAT LOSS – TIP 39

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Go to bed before 10.30pm

It surprises me how many of us don’t get to bed before 10.30pm.  Approximately 90% of our current clients stay up beyond 10.30pm and when you ask them what they are doing, 100% of these people say the exact same thing: watching TV. So, why are they staying up and how does this contribute to fat loss?

First of all let’s make one thing clear: human are a diurnal species.  We rise in the morning and we sleep at night and during our waking day we do stuff.  Unlike many nocturnal creatures, we are not designed to stay awake ALL NIGHT.

Our body is set up to operate during daylight.  A classic example of this is the fact that our pituitary gland is located directly behind our eyes so that when sunlight hits our eyes, the “wake me up” hormone called serotonin is released.   It gets us ready to take on the day’s activities.

We have very poor eye sight and hearing compared to nocturnal animals.  These two senses clearly point to the fact that we are meant to be awake during the day and sleep at night.

So why go to bed before 10.30pm and how does sleep contribute to fat loss?  As soon as the sun goes down, the pituitary gland secrets the “I’m tired” hormone called melatonin and it’s designed to get us ready for bed time.  It’s during sleep that your body recovers from the day’s activities, exercise, work, learning etc.

From a purely exercise point of view, it’s during sleep that your body grows and recovers from the workouts that you recently subjected it to.  Most people think that they get big when they train.  This is false.  You get bigger when you sleep.

And there’s a 2 sided coin to this recovery stuff.  Your body recovers the most important organ first and in this instance, your brain is the most important organ in the body so, being the smart organ, it focuses the first 4-5 hours of sleep recovering itself first and then the any remaining sleep it will use to recover the rest of the body.  So anyone only getting 4-5 hrs of sleep is ripping the body off the recovery process.  And as an added double whammy bonus, every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two, because in those first 2 hours, the brain gets ¾ of its total recovery required.  The next two hours, the speed of the brains recovery slows dramatically.  So the faster the brain can recover the quicker the body can get its recovery in and the quicker this happens, the more rested, relaxed and recovered your body becomes.

Remember, during the day your body goes through all of the tissue damaging processes, like when you exercise.  It’s not until you lie down and close your eyes, does it re-generate, repair, and replace damaged cells and tissue.  And guess what source of energy the body uses to do all this?  Yep you guessed it, body fat stores.

So you can see how getting to bed before 10.30pm not only assists with burning a truck load of body fat stores, it’s also a great way of  increasing ones healthy, wellness and vitality.

That’s it for today folks.  Tomorrows tip looks at eating fat to lose fat.  Now there’s an oxymoron if ever I saw one.  Till then, keep safe.