Say goodbye to guilt-ridden midnight snack attacks and late-night Netflix binges, because here's a delightful revelation: your body blissfully sheds calories even as you snooze. However, before you trade your running shoes for a cozy duvet, understand that we're talking about a modest 50 to 70 calories torched per hour during sleep, about 15% less than what you'd burn conscious. This translates to approximately 480 calories torched in an eight-hour coma-give and take, depending on a variety of factors.
Here's the thing, while sleep makes a less nightmarish weight loss strategy compared to say, surviving on kale chips alone, it's not an invitation to turn into a sleeping sloth. Quality sleep, as opposed to clocking in more hours under the blanket, can rev up your metabolism and oil the cogs of your weight management machine more effectively. It’s about becoming a lean, mean, sleeping machine – not quite as catchy, we'll concede.
So how do you burn more calories in sleep? One word: muscle. Or rather: resistance training. Yes, the sweaty, grunty business rewarded with fit, firm muscles. A small study on our lovely lady counterparts found that after six weeks of resistance training, their BMR (basal metabolic rate) which is basically your body's idling speed, increased by about 250 calories a day.
Did we mention a good night's sleep boosts weight loss too? People who spent more time sleeping and enjoyed better-quality sleep lost more weight. Limiting your sleep or disturbing it with midnight ice-cream raids however, seems to have the opposite effect: it spikes hunger and threatens your weight loss efforts. Not sleeping enough or poor-quality sleep can hinder how efficiently your body uses food for energy, leading to a complication of health issues including insulin resistance and prediabetes.
Ladies and gents, timing is everything. A fascinating study showed that people who ate their meals earlier in the day felt less hungry and stored fewer fat cells, concluding that late-night pizza binges could potentially hike up your risk of obesity.
So here's the drill: incorporate more high-quality dairy and protein into your diet, limit empty calories, and make some life changes to improve your sleep quality, also known as your "sleep hygiene". You see folks, even in the dreamy world of sleep, the rule remains the same- it's about quality over quantity. Food for thought, or rather, dream fodder!
Tune up your lifestyle with quality sleep, a healthy diet, and regular exercise to turn your body into a calorie-burning machine- even while you're dozing off. Sleep like a child. Burn calories like an athlete.
