Sleep and Weight Gain: What You Need to Know and Do

Welcome back to another addition to "Well-being simplified." I hope you’re enjoying learning the science and putting it into practice for you or your organisation. Today’s post is all about sleep, an underrated superpower for your health. But, like anything, if neglected can wreak havoc at the same time. Increasing your risk of obesity is just one side effect of poor sleep hygiene.

If you don’t do your best to create a sleep environment that allows you quality rest then don’t be surprised if you become the best customer at Starbucks while turning into a sugar monster.

The science behind this is clear with studies showing a strong correlation between poor sleep and obesity [1]. Consistently poor sleep dramatically increases your chance of becoming obese and staying obese - it’s as simple and unfortunate as that.

Two key hormones that impact eating habits due to lack of sleep are leptin and ghrelin. They have roughly opposite effects: ghrelin makes us feel hungry and leptin is mostly responsible for making us feel full. In this way, ghrelin is our signal to go and eat and leptin tells us when to stop.

With adequate sleep, ghrelin levels naturally decrease because our bodies don’t need to burn as many calories when we’re not active. But when we don’t get enough sleep our ghrelin levels don’t decrease as much as they should. Feelings of hunger persist even when the body doesn’t need more calories.

In regards to sleep deprivation and leptin, leptin levels decrease and this essentially tricks the brain into thinking that the body needs to take in more food. The brain then sends a hunger signal (ghrelin) and we end up eating — even though we don’t actually need the energy! This makes it easy to store excess calories and gain weight.

Like anything in health and particularly weight management. Having a plan of action to ensure your sleep get’s prioritised is crucial. If you don't have one follow the below steps:

Step 1: Benchmark where you are now

Getting a general benchmark is always a good place to start. Not only will it allow you to see where you are now but you can use it, again and again, to compare and contrast your own sleep data. There are many tools to assess your sleep, some more accurate than others, a quick and easy validated one is to use the RU-SATED assessment developed by Dr Buysse of the University of Pittsburgh [2]. The tool is comprised of 6 questions and three responses for each question.

The scoring is easy and ranges from 0 to 12. Scores that are closer to 0 would suggest a poorer sleep health status whereas scores closer to 12 would indicate a more positive sleep health status. Simply answer each question tickly which statement is true to you (rarely, sometimes or usually/always). Add up your scores of each question for your total score to see where you sit on the continuum.

Step 2: Check in on your sleep hygiene?

How you set up for sleep is just as important as actually getting sleep. To check on your sleep hygiene sleep audit, you’ll need to grab a notebook or use tne spare pages on the back of your workbook. Then put on your research hat. Yes, it’s going to take a bit of time and thinking about, but it’s a process that you should only have to do once in order to make improvements.

Split up your page into the following sections:

·???????Routines

·???????Environment

·???????Outcomes

Routines

Your current routines have a profound impact on your sleep health. Consider your “normal” every day before you go to sleep, list out everything you’ve done that day and evening that could affect your sleep. After, consider which is worth paying further attention to.

• How many cups of coffee do you have?
• Do you workout in the evening?
• What did you eat? At what time?
• Are you on any medications?
• How much alcohol do you consume?
• How was your stress level on a scale of 1-10 (1 = poor, 10 = no problem)?
• What time do normally stop working for the day?
• Did you take anything negative to bed with you?
• What time did you put your phone/iPad/laptop down?
• What did you do to fall asleep Read/watch TV/etc.

Taking note of your routines and how they impact your sleep behaviour will help you pinpoint any recurring patterns that might be upsetting your sleep.

Environment

The environment is another big driver of health behaviour, your sleep environment, in particular, will therefore play an important role in whether it's driving healthy or unhealthy sleep behaviour. Consider the following:

• How does your mattress feel?
• What is the temperature of the room?
• What does the room smell like?
• How much light is in your room?
• Are your pillows lumpy or saggy? Do you have enough pillows or too many?
• What noises do you hear?
• Is the room tidy or cluttered?

Temperature and light are two very important variables when it comes to sleep. Creating a sound sleep environment?will help you get a higher overall quality of rest. Pay attention to how many times you wake up throughout the night and why. Are you?too hot? Does your neck hurt from a saggy pillow? It’s easy to ignore these things in drowsy state, but taking a closer look will uncover the hidden factors that affect your sleep.

Other key considerations to take note of include:

Stimulants. This one is obvious, but on the molecular level, the longer one is awake, there is increased production of a neurotransmitter called adenosine. One of the jobs of adenosine is to increase sleepiness and to help initiate sleep. Caffine counterbalances this effect by blocking adenosine decreasing your ability to fall asleep. Aim to have your stimulant fix early in the day avoiding them after 1pm.?

Workout times. Working out too close to bedtime wmay trigger your stress response raising cortisol (stress hormone) particularly if it’s complex work. Working out too close to bedtime, particularly with workouts that stretch the nervous system (weight lifting, HIIT, sprinting) will essentially wake your nervous system right up when it should be on wind down mode [3].

?Help your body enter the sleep zone with a warm bath or shower. Our body temperature is not constant for 24 hours. When we take a warm bath or shower, This blood flow brings the heat from the core to the surface and rejects the heat to the environment and causes a drop in body temperature. Therefore, if you take a warm bath/shower at the right time, (typically one to two hours before bedtime)?it will aid your natural circadian process and improve your sleep.

Limit alcohol right before you go to sleep. You will know that If you consume alcohol it doesn’t take long for your eyelids to drop. The problem is, that same beer or glass or wine also suppresses DEEP sleep known as REM sleep, you’re less likely to reach that deep deep sleep cycle that makes you feel so refreshed the next day.

Release the tension in your body that’s built up during the day. Naturally, your body will build up tension in the day. To ease that tension and bring you into a relaxed state practising relaxation techniques such as listening to a guided sleep meditation using apps like headspace or calm can help. Our mProve app features many similar benefits (learn more here) Similarly taking deep and long slow breaths like box breathing in another way to release all that build up from the day.

?Step 3: Create a checklist to overturn sleep-sacrificing habits

Once you’ve got a better understanding of the potential standing between you and a solid night’s sleep, the next step of your sleep audit is to write down a checklist that will keep you on track for replacing those behaviours with sleep-friendly ones. Start with choosing a bedtime that is eight hours before your waketime. Then, work back from there.

Your checklist may look like this:

1.????Set your alarm for 10 minutes before your intended bedtime so you have time to wash your face and brush your teeth. (____ p.m.)

2.????Turn off all your screens one hour before ____ p.m.

3.????Stop drinking alcohol three to four hours before ____ p.m.

4.????Stop drinking coffee six to eight hours before ____ p.m.

5.????Stop working at least one hour before ____ p.m.

6.????Have a warm bath/shower before _____ p.m

Once you’ve weeded out these behaviours, you can lock in a sufficient sleep routine so that you don’t hijack your brain into thinking it's “food time again and again”. Yes, you’ll probably have to sacrifice a few things but you’ll be rewarded tenfold in no time.

Summary

There are multiple factors at play when it comes to weight gain. Sleep is one of the key players however, disregard it at your peril, don't be surprised if you mindlessly adopt better eating habits if you master a sound sleep ritual.

References

1. Beccuti, G., & Pannain, S. (2011). Sleep and obesity.?Current opinion in clinical nutrition and metabolic care,?14(4), 402–412. https://doi.org/10.1097/MCO.0b013e3283479109

2. Ravyts, S. G., Dzierzewski, J. M., Perez, E., Donovan, E. K., & Dautovich, N. D. (2021). Sleep Health as Measured by RU SATED: A Psychometric Evaluation.?Behavioral sleep medicine,?19(1), 48–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/15402002.2019.1701474

3. Vincent GE, Sargent C, Roach GD, Miller DJ, Kovac K, Scanlan AT, Waggoner LB, Lastella M. Exercise before bed does not impact sleep inertia in young healthy males. J Sleep Res. 2020 Jun;29(3):e12903. doi: 10.1111/jsr.12903. Epub 2019 Oct 17. PMID: 31621995.

About the Author

Declan is a leading health and wellbeing consultant working for Health at Work (Part of the Medicash Group). He takes enormous pride in supporting businesses with their health and wellbeing goals and has designed multiple wellbeing training courses, strategies and interventions to bring “wellbeing to life” in organisations up and down the UK. He prides himself on being able to combine the evidence base with the practical “know how” to solve real-world problems for people and organisations. When he’s not working, you’ll likely find him reading the latest research study, competing in duathlons or cleaning up the mess his youngest daughter leaves daily!