The Rest Prescription

You might be thinking “What does rest have to do with weight loss?”. We’re so glad you asked, because rest has everything to do with weight loss. Chronic unrest- lack of sleep coupled with a high-stress lifestyle- can nullify the best diet and supplement plan. We’ve seen this happen so often in practice. We counsel a patient who seems to be doing everything right. According to her food records, she’s eating exactly as prescribed, yet the weight isn’t budging. Then we dig a little deeper and learn that she’s up repeatedly at night to soothe her kids back to sleep, on the go constantly during the day, and draining herself further with intense exercise at the gym.

This type of unrest keeps the fight-or-flight response in a permanent “on” position. Our bodies are designed to handle periodic influxes of stress hormones. Triggering your fight or flight response just once a day probably won’t interfere with weight loss, because your body easily clears these hormones. Triggering it every 5 minutes? That’s a recipe for weight gain.

Here’s why. Every time you trigger your stress response, your adrenal glands pump out the stress hormone cortisol. If cortisol levels remain high- as they do when you don’t get enough sleep, keep yourself awake during the day by consuming lots of caffeine, or generally feel edgy and jittery- your entire metabolism becomes imbalanced, suppressing thyroid function, raising blood sugar and blood pressure, weakening muscles and bones, and triggering the body to store more abdominal fat. 

Sleep deprivation and our waistlines

Sleep deprivation has a direct impact on our waistlines. One in three women who experience sleep problems almost every night are obese, compared with one in five women who have trouble sleeping just a few nights a month. How many of us have said “I’ll be able to stay awake a little bit longer if I just eat these pretzels (or another snack food)”?

Sleep deprivation alters levels of many hormones, including serotonin and leptin. This makes you feel hungrier during the day, strengthening cravings for starchy carbohydrates and sweets.

This effect can begin even during childhood: a study completed in Japan determined that 6 and 7 year olds who slept less were more likely to become obese than their peers who went to bed earlier and slept longer. Children sho slept fewer than 8 hours were nearly three times as likely to become obese as children who got 10 or more hours.

Emotional Eating

Do you eat when you are under stress? How about when you feel sad or angry? Although emotional eating is very common- among men and women- it’s also destructive. In fact, it’s the main reason David Schipper, one of our clients, regained his weight. After losing 33 pounds and keeping it off for 6 months, he took on more responsibility at work. The longer hours and stressful dead-lines had him derange of bagels and cookies.
To overcome emotional eating- whether you eat out of stress, sadness, anxiety, or even happiness- you must break with the association that links your emotional state with eating.
First, get honest with yourself. There’s probably a little voice inside your head that’s whispering phrases such as “But I’m really hungry”, “But I really need it” or “But I can’t stop myself”. Oh, hush, True hunger comes on slowly. You can satisfy true hunger with any food, including broccoli. Emotional hunger surfaces quickly and centers on one or two specific foods. With emotional hunger, broccoli or meatballs won’t do. You must have the bread or bagel or cake or cookie or whatever it is that calls to you.
As soon as you realize that you are craving a specific food, you need to find a way to soothe yourself with something other than food. There are plenty of nonfood-related activities you could employ, such as going for a walk, listening to music or calling a loved one. Think about which emotions drive you to eat and think about other ways you can deal with these emotions.

Trans Fats 101

These come mostly from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in restaurant fryers, margarines, packaged snacks, and baked goods. These fats raise the risk of heart disease by upping the bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and lowering the good HDL cholesterol. Although they occur in slams amounts in meat, they primarily come from packaged baked products (cookies, cakes, breads, crackers) and fast food. Eat as few trans fats as possible. They are listed on labels, but be careful of packaging. A food can claim that it contains zero trans fats even if it has 0.5 gram or less. If you eat more than a single portion, you may be getting more trans fats than you bargained for.