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It struck me today that I have rarely touched on one of the most<\/em> fundamental aspects of a healthy lifestyle: sleep. Well, actually, it struck me last night at 2am as I lay awake, staring at the ceiling in bed.<\/p>\n Sleep is one of those precious things we don\u2019t realize we love until we can\u2019t have it, isn\u2019t it? We never love sleep so much as when our alarms go off. That\u2019s the exact moment we say, \u201cI\u2019m gonna go to bed early tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n Sleep is crucial for both physical and emotional health. A proper amount of it improves brain function needed for learning, memory, problem solving, and mood. Sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of depression, heart disease, kidney disease, and stroke. Basically, getting enough sleep is the best thing you can do for your body and mind.<\/p>\n Experts tell us that adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night and perhaps especially if you\u2019re trying to lose weight, getting enough sleep could be the difference between success and failure. Not only does adequate sleep help with mood and energy–which will allow you to make better choices about food and exercise, but studies have shown that your body even burns more fat when it gets enough rest. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that people who got under seven hours of sleep per night lost half as much fat as people who got adequate rest. The sleep deprived dieters also felt significantly hungrier, were less satisfied after meals, and lacked the energy to exercise. http:\/\/annals.org\/article.aspx?articleid=746184<\/p>\n I have struggled with sleep for most of my life. I can fall asleep; I just can\u2019t stay asleep. If you look at a graph of my sleep (thanks Fitbit for more sleep related anxiety!), the periods of restful versus unrestful sleep look like the jagged up-and-down beat of a rap song. If you\u2019re like me, you arrive at the eleven o\u2019clock hour wishing we could fast-forward to morning. The notion of \u201cgoing to bed\u201d is never so simple. We\u2019re in our heads, and if there were an OFF switch, we would have pushed that years ago.<\/p>\n Every single thing we do requires energy and when we don\u2019t replenish that energy with restorative sleep, we rely on the cheap stuff, like caffeine or sugar. And where sleep would actually refuel us, sugar doesn\u2019t. It lasts for an hour, two at most, then we want it again. The trouble is we\u2019re so tired we become out of touch with our fullness cues. Dr. Kenneth Wright, Jr., the director of the sleep and chronobiology lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder noted that his sleep-deprived study patients preferred high calorie foods and the kinds they chose when they were sleep deprived added up to about 600 calories more than the foods that they wanted when they were well-rested. \u201cThere\u2019s something that changes in our brain when we\u2019re sleepy that\u2019s irrespective of how much energy we need,\u201d says Dr. Wright. \u201cThe brain wants more even when the energy need has been fulfilled.\u201d<\/p>\n When I consider the triggers for most of my poor eating choices, my streaks of not exercising, my binge eating episodes, 90% of them come down to: feeling depleted physically and\/or emotionally. Which makes me realize how critically important it is to try to maximize healthy sleep which is the biggest influencer on energy and mood.<\/p>\n Tell me: How is your sleep?\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It struck me today that I have rarely touched on one of the most fundamental aspects of a healthy lifestyle: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[999],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15850","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andiemitchell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why is sleep important?<\/h2>\n