Cavewomen Don't Get Fat (6 page)

Most adults are familiar with the consequences of sleep deprivation: irritability, a case of the three o'clock in the afternoon yawns, lack of mental focus, and—what was I saying? But there's another consequence of sleep deprivation: it can make you fat.

Statistics show that back in the 1960s, the average American slept eight and a half hours per night. Today we sleep fewer than seven hours per night. The rise in obesity has increased significantly during that same period, and the numbers are much more than a coincidence. While toxins play a large role in causing obesity, not getting enough sleep does as well. The less we sleep, the more we weigh.

We know that getting enough sleep builds muscles, facilitates fat burning, reduces cravings and hunger, and gives us better appetite control. Sleep has an even greater impact as a metabolic modulator than food or exercise does, and therefore governs your hormones and your body's ability to lean out. A lack of sleep burns muscle, packs on body fat, and makes us insulin resistant, with the blood work of someone who is obese or diabetic. After just four nights of sleep deprivation, it takes three times more insulin to cause a normal response to carbohydrates in the bloodstream.

We are born with circadian rhythms that dictate our sleep-wake cycles. Circadian rhythms encompass a twenty-four-hour metabolic cycle that is programmed into our genes. These programs are designed to be as metabolically efficient as possible. But what
happens when our metabolism is affected by external stimuli and no longer in line with our genetic programming? Our metabolic processes become far less efficient.

We are genetically programmed to work best in daylight. In the daytime, the metabolic processes that control energy, stress, and appetite work best. But after nightfall, these processes become far less efficient. Our appetite gets turned on, so we eat more; our food does not get converted to energy; our stress levels stay elevated; and we gain weight. But when we catch enough z's, we keep our metabolism efficiently running so that we have more energy and actually eat less.

Here are four bet-you-didn't-know ways that sleep can help you lose weight.

1. Sleep Makes You Less Hungry.
Sleep is critical in controlling fat storage because of the role it plays in regulating hormones. Two hormones in particular rule the roost with appetite regulation: ghrelin and leptin. They're the boss ladies of appetite regulation. Ghrelin says, “I'm hungry,” and leptin says, “I've had enough.” Ghrelin, secreted in the lining of the stomach, increases hunger; its levels are highest before a meal and lowest after we've eaten. The ideal scenario is the perfect balance between ghrelin and leptin—all achievable on the Paleo Chic plan. Yup, that's right, eating plenty of lean protein suppresses ghrelin and shuts off the hunger mechanism in the brain. And sleep deprivation increases ghrelin and decreases leptin, so a good night's sleep is imperative when fighting the battle of the bulge.

Restricting sleep changes how the brain functions and can cause you to crave that chocolate chip cookie you would otherwise do without. The next time you have a craving, ask yourself how you slept last night!

2. Sleep Decreases Daytime Stress Levels.
As you know now, the stress hormone cortisol is a guilty party in contributing to obesity. When our cortisol levels are high, we tend to pack on more fat at the expense of muscle tissue. Sleep plays a major role in cortisol production and our circadian rhythms. Cortisol levels are highest in the morning, to help us get up and out of bed. Once we have breakfast after an overnight fast, the levels fall rapidly. (This is why you must eat breakfast every morning.) Skipping breakfast will raise your cortisol level and keep it elevated for hours, helping you pack on more body fat.

3. Sleep Increases the Body's Ability to Burn Calories.
Even if you're following a calorie-restricted diet, you won't make a dent in fat loss until you visit the sandman, because your body will burn fewer calories and pack on more fat no matter how much you limit your food intake. Your appetite will also spiral out of control, and as a result, you'll eat more than your body needs. Worse yet, insomnia is also a cause of insulin resistance, which helps store your food as fat. (See reasons 1 and 2, above.)

Eating lean protein and nuts controls the “I'm hungry” hormone ghrelin, whereas eating sugary snacks spikes it. Control your hunger and cravings with protein and fats and try to head to bed by ten o' clock to reset your hormones.

4.
Sleep Increases Muscle Mass.
Sleep loss interferes with the body's ability to build muscle mass. Sleep is an anabolic agent because it causes the pituitary gland in the brain to release growth hormone during intervals throughout the night, which stimulates growth and regeneration and supports the production of lean muscle mass. Growth hormone levels are highest when we are young and growing; as we age, the levels drop naturally, and we produce much less (though women do produce more than men). Some people try to delay the effects of aging by injecting themselves with growth hormone, but eating clean foods, sprinting, and strength-building
exercises are the best things you can do to produce the juice naturally.

So if you're not producing enough growth hormone because you're not getting enough sleep, you'll lose muscle mass and burn fewer calories and fat throughout the day. In a study with subjects who had been sleep deprived while on reduced-calorie diets, one group slept five and a half hours per night; the other slept eight and a half hours per night. Both groups lost similar amounts of weight, but the group that got a good night's rest lost 50 percent more fat than the sleep-deprived group.

If you want to reclaim your body and set yourself up for success, you'll need to aim for at least seven and a half hours of sleep every night. This may require some lifestyle changes, but if you're serious about slimming down, you need to make the connection between quality sleep and body fat percentages. The number of hours you sleep each night should be consistent throughout the week. Don't bother trying to make up for lost sleep on the weekends; that just isn't enough time to reset your hormones.

• Sit down to breakfast within an hour of waking up and then eat at regular intervals throughout the day, since skipping meals elevates cortisol that can interfere with your nightly sleep.

• Start shutting down for the night (washing your face, brushing your teeth) by nine o'clock to facilitate the release of restorative hormones and insure a good night's sleep.

• If you suffer from anxiety and insomnia at night, do ten minutes of deep-breathing exercises before bed. Lie on your back in bed, place your hands on your stomach, and focus on your breath until you feel your stomach rise and fall under your hands. Breathe in and out through your nose, and count to four with each inhalation and exhalation. Let go of all other thoughts and keep coming back to your breath.

• Avoid stimulants such as ephedra and caffeine. Some people need as much as twenty-four hours to clear 1 cup of morning caffeine from their systems. No caffeine should pass your lips after two in the afternoon if you have trouble sleeping!

• Limit workouts to sixty minutes (unless you are walking, which will lower your cortisol), and try to finish your workout at least four hours before bed. With strength and interval workouts, at the sixty-minute mark, your testosterone levels start to decline and cortisol levels rise—not a good combo for sleeping.

• Meditate. The best part about having a brain is that you can retrain it and create positive changes within yourself. Meditation is one of my favorite ways to rewire, because it promotes a sense of calm and relaxation all day long—even if you do it the night before. The amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of nerve cells deep within the brain, regulates our emotions and is the greatest beneficiary of meditation. If you're feeling anxious, struggling with insomnia, or just craving some deeply restorative and relaxing sleep, practice some guided imagery and form scenarios in your head about places that relax you and watch the magic unfold after a few short days.

• Have an orgasm, either with your partner or by yourself. This will release tension and prompt the flow of feel-good hormones that calm the brain and nourish the nervous system.

Each day presents a new opportunity for us to strive for a good night's sleep. You'll be amazed how your body composition changes once you pair sleep with good nutrition and smart exercise.

W
e've all heard the expression “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This couldn't be truer than when it comes to trying to lose weight. For many of us, no matter how much we improve our diets or add more exercise classes to our schedules, those three digits on our scales won't budge.

Along with those good intentions, the road to dieting is also paved with harmful toxins that seep into every aspect of our lives. Those toxins are found in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the technology we use. You name it; toxins are everywhere. We can't see them, we usually can't smell them, and we don't taste them. But they are everywhere, and they undermine our ability to lose weight more than anything else. Because we women carry more body fat than men do, we make better storehouses for toxins. Fat is where they like to hang out. And the more toxic we are, the more fat we store in an effort to dilute those toxins.

Scientists already know that pollutants such as pesticides, fertilizers, and the chemicals found in cleaning products are rapidly moved from the bloodstream and into the body's stored fat. Think of your fat cells as your body's toxic waste dump, the landfill where it tries to hide these chemicals. The more toxins you are exposed to,
the harder the body has to work to shuttle these harmful substances away from your vital organs, and the more fat it believes it needs to produce to shield itself from them.

Unfortunately, there is a huge metabolic cost to this kind of toxic garbage hauling and storage: our bodies have to work extremely hard to function under this particularly modern strain. (Cavewomen had all sorts of hazards to worry about, but toxic chemicals wasn't one of them.)

Left to her own devices, Mother Nature does all right by us women. But when we dump toxins into the environment, smoke cigarettes, and use cosmetics, personal care products, and chemical household cleaners, she's going to bite us back. When our bodies hold on to toxins, we become ill in many ways. One example is that our bodies work hard to maintain those fat cells, and this creates a catch-22 situation: our fat-burning mechanisms become sluggish, our appetites increase, and, despite our best efforts to diet, we begin to put on more weight. It's hard to get rid of something (in this case toxin-laced fat) when your body wants to hold on to it so badly. The body refuses to use these fat stores as fuel because that would release the toxins into the circulation, which would be a very bad thing. So although your body may be in survival mode and ultimately trying to protect you, you're not going to like what you see.

But there is a way to rid our bodies of harmful toxins, and we've all heard the term: detoxification. There are very concrete steps we can take to reduce the amount of environmental toxins we are exposed to and to decrease the amount of toxins we ingest with our food.

But before I get into the whys and hows of detoxing, let's chat about how harmful toxins impact the body's ability to lose weight. Our understanding of just how dangerous these substances are has accelerated dramatically in just the past few years. Top-notch scientists and nutritionists have gathered data showing that poor diet and lack of exercise are not the only causes of our obesity epidemic.
There's a rapidly growing body of evidence that links the chemicals found in everything from pesticides, cosmetics, packaging materials (for food and other items), and certain foods to increased fat production. A special word has even been coined by biologist Bruce Blumberg of the University of California at Irvine for these obesity-promoting toxins: obesogens.