It’s no secret that after a night of poor or interrupted sleep, life just becomes so much harder. Poor sleep quality and later bedtimes are not only associated with fatigue, brain fog, impaired immunity, impaired memory, underperforming at work and caffeine binging but they’re also both linked with increased food intake, poor diet quality, increased alcohol consumption and excess body weight.
Hopefully this information alone, highlights just how important it is to be paying attention to your sleep, especially if you have a fat loss goal – dieting definitely does not need to be made any harder!
Below, I go through how sleep impacts our eating behaviour so dramatically and some factors you may want to be considering when it comes to improving your sleep hygiene. I hope you find this useful.
How does poor sleep quality impact our food intake?
There are few proposed mechanisms behind this and in my opinion, it’s likely to be a combination of them all;
1) Insufficient sleep is likely to alter key appetite regulating hormones (grehlin, leptin and cortisol) resulting in enhanced hunger sensations.
2) We live in an environment full of energy dense, highly palatable foods that are readily available to us 24/7. So, it makes sense that the more time we spend awake, the more time we have available to eat. Research suggests that habitual short sleepers (averaging <6hrs per night) eat a higher number of meals per day and snack more frequently, compared to long sleepers.
3) A lack of sleep often brings about some level of psychological distress such as low mood or anxiety, this has been shown to increase our preference for energy dense foods in the hope of enhancing our energy levels and alleviating negative mood.
4) Finally, brain imaging scans have highlighted that there was less reactivity of reward related brain systems following a night of impaired sleep, meaning that more exciting rewards were required to create the same level of neural activation. Thus, an enhanced drive to consume “unhealthy” foods.
My top tips for optimising your sleep:
- Establish a consistent bed time and wake time, try to keep this within the same hour, even on weekends.
- Expose yourself to sunlight within the first hour of waking, a morning walk for 20-60 minutes is perfect for this.
- Aim to finish eating for the day 2-3hrs prior to going to bed as digestion can keep you up at night.
- Avoid screens (phone, TV, laptop) 60-90 minutes before going to bed.
- Journal or write a short to do list prior to going to bed, this allows us to relieve our subconscious brain and is my favourite tip for those that struggle to fall asleep because of a “busy brain”.
- Delay caffeine at least one hour after waking as this can “blunt” your bodies natural hormone release in the morning.
- Avoid consuming caffeine after midday.
- Prioritise daily movement, even if it’s just accumulating 60 minutes of walking.
If you don’t already have one, I’d strongly recommend mapping out a bed time routine, even just a couple of behaviours that you can repeat consistently each night that help to signal to the body that you are winding down.
If you have kids, you’ll know just how important a night time routine is for them and the same goes for us too! You wouldn’t expect your kids to fall straight to sleep after an hour of playing video games, so don’t expect yourself to do the same after working right up until bed time.
