Sleep your way to fat loss!

[JSixpack]

Sorry, you exercise religionists.

 

Sleeping longer consistently appeared as the #1 factor in losing weight.

     --https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss

 

Hey--beat this guy's charting! 'Course, it's not ONLY sleeping but low carb as well. Time for a nap . . . ZZZZZZ.

 

Edited August 22, 2016 by JSixpack

[Jingthing]

Yes it is well known that lack of sleep is a common risk factor in developing obesity in the first place.

[tifino]

 

so long as you sleep for 7 hours 15 mins, no more no less

[tropo]

1 hour ago, tifino said:

 

so long as you sleep for 7 hours 15 mins, no more no less

There is absolutely no way to determine the optimum amount of sleep for anyone.

 

If we need to sleep 7 hours and 15 mins, then I have hardly ever had enough sleep.

 

I can sleep as long as I can sleep, that's the best I can do. It will vary a lot depending on activities during the day. You can cut back on your nightly length of sleep by taking power naps during the day. People who already sleep enough will probably gain weight if they sleep more.

 

The only people who will improve fat loss ability by sleeping more are people who didn't sleep enough AND that was a causative factor in their weight gain.

 

Edited August 22, 2016 by tropo

[dontoearth]

You can determine if you are getting enough sleep and general relaxation.  Have your cortisol measured the next time you need a blood test at the doctor or the lab or the hospital.  It is not an expensive test.  If you have elevated Cortisol you are not sleeping well or not sleeping enough or you are allowing some kind of stress to effect your health.  This will lead to weight gain if you don't nip it in the bud.   High Cortisol is a major factor in insulin resistance which leads to uncontrollable weight gain.

[robblok]

15 hours ago, dontoearth said:

You can determine if you are getting enough sleep and general relaxation.  Have your cortisol measured the next time you need a blood test at the doctor or the lab or the hospital.  It is not an expensive test.  If you have elevated Cortisol you are not sleeping well or not sleeping enough or you are allowing some kind of stress to effect your health.  This will lead to weight gain if you don't nip it in the bud.   High Cortisol is a major factor in insulin resistance which leads to uncontrollable weight gain.

 

Nice one i will do that next time im going to measure stuff. I do bloostests once every half year. 

[happy Joe]

Total urban legend.

 

Obese people are ingesting more calories they expend in. All other theory on this subject is literature.

 

Fat people know that. They also know that food addiction is bad for health and have the ability to stop disorder at any time by ceasing these excesses. The only problem is they lack the will to do it.

 

But do not say too loud because it's not politically correct.

[tropo]

2 hours ago, robblok said:

 

Nice one i will do that next time im going to measure stuff. I do bloostests once every half year. 

It's a waste of money Rob. It's not a cheap test and your cortisol levels will fluctuate widely over a day, week or month. Unless you monitored it many times a day, the results will be
meaningless.

 

The best way to determine if you are sleeping enough is how you feel and how well you train/exercise. Your performance will deteriorate if you're sleep deprived. If you use a heart rate monitor over a certain course you could easily determine if your performance is dropping. Anyway, it's easy to know if you are sleep deprived - you just feel sleepy and function at a lower capacity LOL.

 

I don't know who came up with the idea that the optimum sleeping pattern for humans is a straight 7 or 8 hours. Due to circumstances recently I've developed a biphasic sleeping pattern that I cannot break (sleeping in 2 short shifts per day). It's incredible how alert and energetic I feel after my first 3 or 4 hour sleeping "shift". I get straight into a workout. After a straight 7 or 8 hours (rare for me) I feel groggy and it takes a while to wake up fully. The second shift is anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours.

 

The way I see it, if the body needs sleep it will take it. Too many people obsess over getting a certain number of hours per day and the stress makes the goal harder to achieve.

 

[tropo]

2 hours ago, happy Joe said:

Total urban legend.

 

Obese people are ingesting more calories they expend in. All other theory on this subject is literature.

 

Fat people know that. They also know that food addiction is bad for health and have the ability to stop disorder at any time by ceasing these excesses. The only problem is they lack the will to do it.

 

But do not say too loud because it's not politically correct.

LOL. A number of us have been saying this quite loudly on here for years - it makes for very long and heated debates.

[robblok]

1 minute ago, tropo said:

It's a waste of money Rob. It's not a cheap test and your cortisol levels will fluctuate widely over a day, week or month. Unless you monitored it many times a day, the results will be
meaningless.

 

The best way to determine if you are sleeping enough is how you feel and how well you train/exercise. Your performance will deteriorate if you're sleep deprived. If you use a heart rate monitor over a certain course you could easily determine if your performance is dropping. Anyway, it's easy to know if you are sleep deprived - you just feel sleepy and function at a lower capacity LOL.

 

I don't know who came up with the idea that the optimum sleeping pattern for humans is a straight 7 or 8 hours. Due to circumstances recently I've developed a biphasic sleeping pattern that I cannot break (sleeping in 2 short shifts per day). It's incredible how alert and energetic I feel after my first 3 or 4 hour sleeping "shift". I get straight into a workout. After a straight 7 or 8 hours (rare for me) I feel groggy and it takes a while to wake up fully. The second shift is anything from 30 minutes to a couple of hours.

 

The way I see it, if the body needs sleep it will take it. Too many people obsess over getting a certain number of hours per day and the stress makes the goal harder to achieve.

 

 

Some nights I sleep like crap, waking up often to go to the toilet and stuff like that, other nights i sleep great. Over all i dont think that i am sleep deprived my training would surely suffer. I just had a high carb high protein meal and will wait an hour for my next workout (with rowing attached) if anything training is going well and I am looking forward to my sessions (not all but most)

[tropo]

19 minutes ago, robblok said:

 

Some nights I sleep like crap, waking up often to go to the toilet and stuff like that, other nights i sleep great. Over all i dont think that i am sleep deprived my training would surely suffer. I just had a high carb high protein meal and will wait an hour for my next workout (with rowing attached) if anything training is going well and I am looking forward to my sessions (not all but most)

That's the same problem I have. I get up to pee, then start thinking about stuff and can't get back to sleep. Perhaps a pee bottle next to the bed would help... saving a walk and less chance to wake up fully. It helped me a lot. I originally started doing that to help with plantar fasciitus because that hurts a lot when you first get up to walk and the pain wakes you up - then continued once that was cured. Use Dettol to keep the bottle smelling fresh and make sure it has a wide opening to accommodate an inopportune woody.  May I recommend the 7Eleven green 6 litre water bottles. If you can't fit into there, then perhaps the 20 litre water bottles LOL.

[robblok]

10 minutes ago, tropo said:

That's the same problem I have. I get up to pee, then start thinking about stuff and can't get back to sleep. Perhaps a pee bottle next to the bed would help... saving a walk and less chance to wake up fully. It helped me a lot. I originally started doing that to help with plantar fasciitus because that hurts a lot when you first get up to walk and the pain wakes you up - then continued once that was cured. Use Dettol to keep the bottle smelling fresh and make sure it has a wide opening to accommodate an inopportune woody.  May I recommend the 7Eleven green 6 litre water bottles. If you can't fit into there, then perhaps the 20 litre water bottles LOL.

The toilet is next to the bedroom (toilet upstairs and downstairs) 2 toilets .. one person living in the house.. 

[tropo]

4 minutes ago, robblok said:

The toilet is next to the bedroom (toilet upstairs and downstairs) 2 toilets .. one person living in the house.. 

I also have my toilet next to our bedroom, but no steps at all is better than walking there in the dark.

[JSixpack]

Funny. Nobody read the article 'cause everybody just knows what he knows. Gotta love this forum.

 

The point of the sleep aspect is actually for the intermittent fasting.

 

Longer fasting periods: This is the #1 contributor to weight-loss. sleep longer, stop eating as early as possible before going to sleep and start eating as late as possible after sleeping. Skip breakfast, after some time you won't feel hungry in the morning anymore. After long periods of fasting, the body chemistry adjusts: I need more ATP, but I don't have glucose in the blood, and the glycogen in the liver is all fully consumed (takes about 1-2 days of low or no carbs) so there's no other option, but to start breaking-up stored fat. This elevates the enzymes that help with breaking up fat and the Krebs cycle reverses direction in the critical paths. Instead of transforming excess-carbs into stored fat, it breaks-up the fat for energy.

[JSixpack]

6 hours ago, happy Joe said:

Total urban legend.

 

Obese people are ingesting more calories they expend in. All other theory on this subject is literature.

 

Fat people know that. They also know that food addiction is bad for health and have the ability to stop disorder at any time by ceasing these excesses. The only problem is they lack the will to do it.

 

But do not say too loud because it's not politically correct.

 

Or maybe it's just ignorant and wrong besides implying a moral judgment stemming from one of the deadly sins: gluttony.

 

7 Common Calorie Myths We Should All Stop Believing

Edited August 23, 2016 by JSixpack

[tropo]

1 hour ago, JSixpack said:

Funny. Nobody read the article 'cause everybody just knows what he knows. Gotta love this forum.

 

The point of the sleep aspect is actually for the intermittent fasting.

 

Longer fasting periods: This is the #1 contributor to weight-loss. sleep longer, stop eating as early as possible before going to sleep and start eating as late as possible after sleeping. Skip breakfast, after some time you won't feel hungry in the morning anymore. After long periods of fasting, the body chemistry adjusts: I need more ATP, but I don't have glucose in the blood, and the glycogen in the liver is all fully consumed (takes about 1-2 days of low or no carbs) so there's no other option, but to start breaking-up stored fat. This elevates the enzymes that help with breaking up fat and the Krebs cycle reverses direction in the critical paths. Instead of transforming excess-carbs into stored fat, it breaks-up the fat for energy.

Guilty as charged! LOL> I tried to read the article, but it was so badly presented I gave up. Yes, I'm lazy that way. If you want people to read something - spoon feed it.

 

The thing is you can't just dial in extra sleep whenever you want it, especially older folk, so even IF it is effective, it's not practical.

 

Besides that, you'd be lucky to burn 100 calories per hour awake (BMR), so the difference a few hours would make is not very significant. Sleep too long (if you can) and you can get groggy and lazy (I'm sure I'm not the only one), so I would be less likely to exercise or do anything other than sitting down reading this forum for hours. After a shorter sleep I feel  more alert and energetic - and straight into an exercise routine. If I get sleepy later on I'll take a power nap. I don't feel hungry in the morning anyway and have a tendency toward intermittent fasting as it comes naturally - eating most of my calories later on the day. I do consume high carb drinks, usually grape juice or coconut juice, as I train to keep the fire burning.

 

The only benefit I can see from long sleeping is better recovery from hard training.

 

[tropo]

1 hour ago, JSixpack said:

 

Or maybe it's just ignorant and wrong besides implying a moral judgment stemming from one of the deadly sins: gluttony.

 

7 Common Calorie Myths We Should All Stop Believing

You're being a bit harsh there IMO. One of the points in the link you posted proves his the point quite well. I needed that on another thread were I was being chastised for believing exercise does more than just burn calories while you doing it. 

 

I'll paste the appropriate section here:

Exercise helps you lose weight only by burning calories.

Most people think of exercise as a way to mechanically combust calories. And that’s true, to a point. Exercise does “burn” calories, and this is a factor in weight loss. But it does lots of other cool things to our physiology that can assist with improving body composition, too.

Compared to something high intensity like burpees or something aerobic like running a 10k, lifting free weights doesn’t burn many calories when you’re lifting them. But it does improve insulin sensitivity, which reduces the amount of insulin we secrete for a given amount of carbohydrate and increases our ability to burn body fat. It increases muscle mass, which uses calories (protein). It strengthens connective tissue, which also uses calories. It even preserves metabolic rate during weight loss and boosts it for up to 72 hours post-workout. All these changes affect the fate of the calories we ingest.

If calories burnt were the most important factor, then the best way to lose weight would be to hammer it out with as much endurance exercise as you can withstand because that’s the most calorie intensive. But studies show that combination training — aerobic and resistance training — leads to greater reductions in body fat than either modality alone.

Even aerobic exercise isn’t just about mechanically burning calories. It also preferentially targets the reward regions of our brains, reducing the allure and spontaneously lowering our intake of junk food.

 

I must say I haven't experienced any "reducing the allure and spontaneously lowering our intake of junk food". I do a hell of a lot of cardio and resistance training and it hasn't dulled my desire for chocolate or cakes etc. I do resist though, but it's no easier than if I don't exercise.
 

Edited August 23, 2016 by tropo

[dontoearth]

3 hours ago, JSixpack said:

Funny. Nobody read the article 'cause everybody just knows what he knows. Gotta love this forum.

 

The point of the sleep aspect is actually for the intermittent fasting.

 

Longer fasting periods: This is the #1 contributor to weight-loss. sleep longer, stop eating as early as possible before going to sleep and start eating as late as possible after sleeping. Skip breakfast, after some time you won't feel hungry in the morning anymore. After long periods of fasting, the body chemistry adjusts: I need more ATP, but I don't have glucose in the blood, and the glycogen in the liver is all fully consumed (takes about 1-2 days of low or no carbs) so there's no other option, but to start breaking-up stored fat. This elevates the enzymes that help with breaking up fat and the Krebs cycle reverses direction in the critical paths. Instead of transforming excess-carbs into stored fat, it breaks-up the fat for energy.

My apology.  I clicked on the link and saw the long series of files and thought it was the wrong link or had scrambled.  I went back and did a full read!   It is the most detailed 'weight-loss high tech journal' I have ever seen.  His sudden accelerated loss at the end of his chart shows he was indeed learning from collecting the data.  He went the high fat--- glycemic index on the  carbs and intermittent fasting routine after his analysis.  He did get some exercise but not excessive and no mention of resistance training or weight lifting.  In his sources he points to further reading and mentions the Jason Fung book The Obesity Code where he seems to have gotten his motivation, inspiration and ideas.  Thanks for pointing out this article.  And thanks for giving us the big second notice to read it if we didn't!  I am really glad I did.  I feel it validates a lot of what I am working on right now to shed my fat.

Edited August 23, 2016 by dontoearth
left out a sentence

[dontoearth]

As I re-read the Obesity Code by Jason Fung I realized that many of his top weight loss variables are also from the low insulin index like olives, olive oil, cheese, and bacon and eggs.   The insulin index takes into account that many of the Atkins non-carb foods in the protein category still stimulate lots of insulin production which is contrary to reducing weight.

[tominbkk]

On 8/22/2016 at 5:55 PM, dontoearth said:

You can determine if you are getting enough sleep and general relaxation.  Have your cortisol measured the next time you need a blood test at the doctor or the lab or the hospital.  It is not an expensive test.  If you have elevated Cortisol you are not sleeping well or not sleeping enough or you are allowing some kind of stress to effect your health.  This will lead to weight gain if you don't nip it in the bud.   High Cortisol is a major factor in insulin resistance which leads to uncontrollable weight gain.

Double spiral as many overweight people have apnea, which really disrupts their sleep as well.

[tropo]

1 hour ago, tominbkk said:

Double spiral as many overweight people have apnea, which really disrupts their sleep as well.

That's a good point! It's hard to sleep when you're suffocating... and then you're too tired all day to exercise or prepare healthy meals as you get around in a zombie like state. It's a vicious cycle indeed... and a good reason to take care if you're not already fat to ensure you never will be.

[chiang mai]

At first I thought this was going to be a, "drink your way to sobriety" kinda thread but then I read the article and it does ring true, longer fasting periods does make sense.

 

FWIW my recent attempts to shed a couple of unwanted kilo's have been very successful. I was getting a tad nervous at seeing 84/85 kilo's in the A.M. so I decided to do something about it: eating half my dinner has worked really well as has skipping dinner entirely (rarely) if a I had a big lunch, 81 has now become the new norm, wheee!

[rogeroc]

Well you cannot eat when you are sleeping

[chiang mai]

13 minutes ago, rogeroc said:

Well you cannot eat when you are sleeping

 

I bet my wife could find a way.

[tropo]

11 hours ago, rogeroc said:

Well you cannot eat when you are sleeping

Of course!... but a lot of us are older and staying asleep for long periods is not possible. It's not like most of us can dial it in...

 

I could hardly believe it yesterday - I actually managed 8 hours for the first time in months. Normally it's 5 - 6 hours at the most. If I really try hard I can manage another hour sometimes, but it's hard work. Who would have thought sleeping is hard work LOL.

[tropo]

44 minutes ago, SummerHaze said:

I don't think that it's true. I sleep enough (6-8 hours ) and see no changes in my weight. I think that the more important are healthy diet and intensive workouts. I am on the way to lose a few pounds, even start taking anavar. I am serious in my decision and I am sick of being fat.

Anavar is toxic to the liver. It will also lower your testosterone levels. It is normally supplemented with the addition of testosterone. It will shut down your own production, which could also be low to start with.

 

I wouldn't recommend it, in fact I'd say it's bad choice.

 

If you like to drink alcohol, then taking it is even more dangerous.

[Strange]

22 minutes ago, tropo said:

1 hour ago, SummerHaze said:

I don't think that it's true. I sleep enough (6-8 hours ) and see no changes in my weight. I think that the more important are healthy diet and intensive workouts. I am on the way to lose a few pounds, even start taking anavar. I am serious in my decision and I am sick of being fat.

Anavar is toxic to the liver. It will also lower your testosterone levels. It is normally supplemented with the addition of testosterone. It will shut down your own production, which could also be low to start with.

 

I wouldn't recommend it, in fact I'd say it's bad choice.

 

If you like to drink alcohol, then taking it is even more dangerous.

 

Listen to this guy. 

[Alive]

I know a guy who laid down to sleep and never woke up. It was amazing how he lost weight and eventually even disappeared!

[Alive]

On Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at 9:34 AM, happy Joe said:

Total urban legend.

 

Obese people are ingesting more calories they expend in. All other theory on this subject is literature.

 

Fat people know that. They also know that food addiction is bad for health and have the ability to stop disorder at any time by ceasing these excesses. The only problem is they lack the will to do it.

 

But do not say too loud because it's not politically correct.

 

You can't explain everything so simply. Why aren't you an Olympic athlete or NBA superstar if all people are the equally the same? Please tell us why you aren't an Olympic athlete or why you absolutely could have been one. By your logic ,you just have to exercise more to be that Olympic athlete so why didn't you have that willpower.

 

 

[Alive]

I have another general comment. Why is it people come onto the fat forum to say that fat people have no willpower yet these same folks won't go onto the Smoking forum or Drinking forum and spout their logic. We have to face food everyday and it is addictive. People will kill other to eat when they are starving. The problem of weight loss is not simple; you can't stop cold turkey like you can with smoking and drinking and drugs. Yes, it's a big problem worldwide but the people who have to deal with it don't need to hear from trolls who seek them out to shame them or to tell them that they are weak or have no willpower.