Sunday morning I tossed up a post about not sleeping. 

Specifically, I wrote about whether or not ignoring your sleep habits could be one of the key missing components in your effort to lose weight and get yourself and your body back in whack. (It stands to reason that if you're out of whack, then whack is where you'd like to be.) 

The short answer is yes, sleep is crucial for health and fitness. But it's one thing to know you have trouble sleeping and another thing to figure out what to do about it. 

I often have trouble falling asleep at night. Knowing this, I put off getting into bed. Because my first two hours in bed are usually a party for one on the hamster wheel of life. But the cycle continues, as I go to bed later and later because I hope that by getting in bed later, I'll fall asleep sooner.  

And also I want to poke people who just fall asleep when their heads hit the pillow. Or who nap on airplanes.

There's a good chance these are morning people. In theory, sleep should be pretty straight forward. When it gets dark outside, we observe the rules of our circadian rhythm, and go to bed. Then we wake up when it's light out. 

But that's only theory. 

The reality is that most of us get in bed when it's dark out and then spend another 30 minutes or more on our phones or other electronic device. 

If nothing else, you've learned about my spectacular decisions regarding my hair while reading this blog. 

Replacing my books with the kindle app on my iPad was likely the worst decision I made since frosting my hair.  

And I think we can all agree, looking at the picture off to the right, that was a bad idea. Because, you know, blonde on me is actually orange.

1. Put the screen away two hours before you go to bed. 

Do yourself a favor, and as hard as this is, try to eliminate screen time for an actual two hours before you go to bed. Because I currently spend a lot of time in the car, I have an Audible subscription and listen to a lot of books on tape (because I can't stop calling them books on tape even though we passed tape in 1994.) 

The small amounts of light from these devices pass through the retina into a part of the hypothalamus, the area of the brain that controls several sleep activities, and delay the release of the sleep-inducing hormone, melatonin. 

And let's face it, sending work emails or worse yet, reading work emails in the last few minutes before bed does little to soothe the mind. A stressful email read can elevate your cortisol levels at the exact time when you need them to be lower.

2. Make the room as dark as possible.

And speaking of melatonin levels, one sure-fire way to suppress them is to let a bunch of artificial light in. Aside from the occasional hotel room, I don't ever remember sleeping in total darkness. Whether it was from a street light outside or a digital clock, there was always some type of light in my room. 

Since I've started sleeping with a mask over my eyes, I've slept a little bit better. Not a lot, but a little. 

3. Kick the cats off the bed. Seriously. Do it.

We have two cats. I don't really talk about it because dogs. Specifically, Rooney. But Rooney sleeps in his own bed in his own room downstairs, because he would take up the entire bed and also dog fur.

The cats however, are a different story. And I don't know about you, but like any ridiculous pet owner, I don't feel like I can disturb the cats when they take up all of my foot space and I end up chewing on my knee caps to sleep around them. 

Do yourself a favor and kick them off. They will move, and if you're lucky, they will re-locate to their own beds. 

BECAUSE THEY HAVE SEVENTEEN OF THEM.

4. Get nine hours of sleep

Hahahahaha...oh wait, you're not kidding?

That's about how I feel when someone suggests nine hours of sleep to me. And I don't even have kids. On days when I have to be at the facility by 5:30 a.m. and I'm an hour away, I'm getting up before 4:00 in the morning. Nine hours of sleep would require me getting into bed at 7:00 p.m. 

And on those nights, even if I did get in bed at something reasonable like 9:00, I still wouldn't fall asleep. So I know that at least twice a week, I can't get nine hours of sleep. But I can work towards that average on the other days. 

5. Limit caffeine intake

Hahahahaha! Oh wait, this one too?

Part of my current cycle is lacking sleep and using caffeine to fuel myself throughout the morning, and sometimes into the afternoon. The reality is you should cut off the caffeine in the morning, and worst case scenario, nine hours before you go to sleep. 

Swap that 2:00 diet coke out for a nap. 

Oh right, you probably can't do that at your desk. Instead, swap the mid-afternoon caffeine out for a short walk, outside, around the hallways, or what-have you.

I realize that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of dealing with the maddening struggles of sleep quantity and quality. For a more in depth look at sleep, check out this article by the maker of Athletic Greens on sleep and cortisol levels.

I don't fall into the category of people who rise and grind. Unless we're talking about coffee beans. I rise and grind my coffee beans. 

Actually, I program the coffee maker the night before, because it’s a bad idea for me to operate machinery first thing in the morning, heavy or otherwise. A Starbucks barista once advised me, when I I arrived at 6:00 a.m. for my coffee, to drink it before driving my car.

I’ve never slept particularly well and I’ve NEVER been a morning person.

You'll notice my cleverness with headlines has not improved. This article was about, yes, you guessed it; morning people. So witty.

On the first day of a new job a few years ago a co-worker said, "One of your references said your only weakness was mornings."

In fact, in that picture off to the right, I wrote a newspaper column (Job no. 4) about how much I disliked morning people. Those perky, chipper, "the day's a-wasting" folks who can get up at 5:00 a.m. and not only remember to use shampoo and soap in the shower, but actually do things like...I don't know...write books and work out.

These people often say things like "I do more before you get out of bed then you'll do all day." And, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Good for you for not punching these people.

In the article, I rail against these people (this was 15 years ago), but what I was also saying was...I can't sleep. I can't fall asleep, I can't stay asleep and so when morning comes around I've got nothing in the tank to start the day.

At 23 years old, I could get away with not sleeping. Now? Well, not so much.

Because I struggle so much with sleep, I’m drawn to most any kind of article that provides insight into my struggles with Mr. Sandman. This post, from the CEO of Athletic Greens, really got my attention. Because in it, he links a lack of sleep to belly fat.

Wha???

Yes, there is a scientific link to a lack of sleep AND chronically elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and fat around your mid-section.

So many of us go through great care to eat well and exercise often, and find ourselves unable to drop inches from our middle. As it turns out, sleep, and specifically quality sleep, might be the missing element. If you’re burning both ends of the candle it won’t matter if your diet and exercise are on point. 

You'll still carry excess abdominal fat.

According to a Nurses’ Health Study, researchers followed roughly 60,000 women for 16 years, asking them about their weight, sleep habits, diet, and other aspects of their lifestyle. At the start of the study, all of the women were healthy, and none were obese; 16 years later, women who slept 5 hours or less per night had a 15 percent higher risk of becoming obese, compared to women who slept 7 hours per night. Short sleepers also had 30 percent higher risk of gaining 30 pounds over the course of the study, compared to women who got 7 hours of sleep per night.

So now, when someone comes to me and says that they are working out six times a week, and watching everything they eat, my first question is how is your sleep? How much do you sleep?

Sleep and hormones

When we don’t get enough sleep, our hormones are thrown completely off kilter. And we all know we need to be on kilter. Kilter is where it’s at.

The hormones ghrelin and leptin both influence your appetite. Ghrelin, know as the hunger hormone, stimulates appetite; the higher the ghrelin level, the hungrier you feel. I call this the gremlin hormone because I’m terrible with pronunciation. 

Leptin affects your appetite in the opposite way, letting you know when your stomach is full. So normal leptin levels regulates those gremlins, keeping your hunger in check. But a lack of sleep can cause your leptin levels to lower and your gremlin levels to rise. 

I would also offer that on those nights when I sleep three hours, and those have been happening a lot lately, I’m too tired to actually care what I’m eating. That lack of sleep impacts my decision making process when it’s time to feed the inner gremlin. 

I don’t want a hard boiled egg when I’m tired. I want Doritoes. All of them. In my face. 

Studies have shown that just a week of sleep deprivation can cause significant alterations in glucose tolerance (i.e. how readily your body's cells can recognize glucose floating around in your blood and pull it into the cells of the body where it will fuel activity.) Impaired glucose tolerance can make you more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

There's also evidence that a lack of sleep can turn you into a raging b**ch. True story. 

Probably half of the clients I work with will point to a couple of areas in particular where they want to lose weight, (though there is no such thing as spot removal when it comes to fat.*) But for many people, abdominal fat is a target area. 

Sleep and cortisol levels

As a side note, in doing my research I discovered that elephants only require three hours of sleep. In case that comes up in trivia next week.

Cortisol is released in response to fear or stress by the adrenal glands as part of the fight-or-flight mechanism. So way back in the day when you were being chased by a saber toothed tiger, you had mad levels of cortisol going on. And it helped you survive. Cortisol also cues your body to hold on to fat. So what we're getting at here is lack of sleep = increased cortisol levels = increased abdominal fat.

During a typical day, you want your cortisol levels to be higher in the morning, so you can brush your teeth with toothpaste and not hemorrhoid cream, and lower at night, so you can fall asleep. Have you ever tried to shut your racing mind off at night? You're mind is going in all different directions and so you try to not think about this, and then not think about that. 

And all of these things are only the tip of the iceberg. 

Check in for the next post on strategies to maybe, just maybe, help you sleep better and longer. 

* I alluded to the thigh master in one of my recent posts - if you recall there was a photo of Suzanne Somers; but you can't actually spot remove fat.