As a personal trainer one of the main areas I like to educate my personal training clients on is the need for the body to be happy in order to obtain a lean physique.
When the body has to fight against all the obstacles that we throw at it, it goes into a defensive lifesaving state which just happens to turn on all the fat storing hormones. Not what we want when our aim is optimal health, aesthetics and performance.
The average person does not get enough sleep; this is one of the main reasons for fat gain and retention. We should be aiming for between 8 and 9.5 hours of sleep a night, not easy in the modern world I know, but an individual getting just 6.5 hours sleep a night compared with 8 doubles their chances of obesity.
There are many reasons as to why this may occur, here are a few.
- A lack of sleep causes an increase in appetite for sugary convenient processed foods in order to make up for the energy we do not have, too much sugar in our diet overtime causes us to become very inefficient at processing sugars and this leads to diabetes and obesity just from looking at sugar (Starchy carbohydrates).
- Due to waking up having had less sleep than we need, our alarms wake us up at a time when we are most likely to be in the deep sleep stage which makes getting up very hard and causes us to reach for the coffee. If we are not getting enough sleep the caffeine in coffee will perk us up for a bit but it is only really going to further stress out our bodies which will again increase our cravings for sugar.
- Exercise is great for overall health, but if you’re not sleeping enough, your body is stressed and you heavily relay on sugar and caffeine to operate, exercise isn’t going to be the best idea at this moment in time as it will only add to the spiral of feeling fatigued, constantly peckish and just generally down. Excessive exercise when already stressed can actually cause an increase in fat stored.
- Not working alongside the circadian rhythm, basically when it’s dark we shouldn’t really be awake and we shouldn’t really be eating. By watching TV late at night, checking our emails and playing on our IPhones we confuse our bodies into thinking that it’s still day time, basically summer time. This turns on all of our fat storing hormones to ensure we have enough fat to survive during winter when we fast more due to more sleep (ideally), but we extend all of our real light hours with artificial light and never have these periods of fasting and so just keep on storing more and more fat.
If you want to lose more fat, just make your body happier, give it more rest, eat proper food, don’t drink caffeine and exercise in a way that doesn’t stress you out until you no longer feel stressed and tired.
Then bring in the intense exercise and speed up fat loss further.
We far too often try to fight are way through all kinds of barriers to reach the desired outcome instead of just looking at how we could remove these barriers.