Sleep can help or hurt your waistline. Here’s why (and how) to get more restful sleep.

Getting enough sleep is key to maintaining a healthy weight, preventing injury and feeling better. The kind of sleep that protects health is of good quality and lasts for at least seven uninterrupted hours. We know hardly anyone gets enough good sleep. Being overweight is associated with poor sleep quality and shorter sleep duration.

Unfortunately, studies show that hormonal fluctuations place women at risk for poor sleep quality.

Getting enough good sleep is fundamental to achieving weight loss. Why? Hormones regulate your appetite, your body’s response to stress and how well your body metabolizes the food you eat. When you do not sleep enough, your hormones change in a way that makes you gain weight. This is because lack of sleep makes the following things happen:

1. You feel hungry.
2. Your body is stimulated to store fat.
3. You feel more stressed and less able to cope.
4. Your will power is reduced.

All of this adds up to mean you eat more calories when you don’t get enough sleep and your body puts those extra calories into fat storage.

Here’s the good news. When you get enough sleep, you are:

• More attentive
• Better able to organize
• More likely to sustain the will power required to make healthy changes.
  There’s more good news—exercise improves sleep economy. That means women who run/walk get better quality sleep.

So, how can you really get better sleep? Try these simple tips: 

• Go to bed at the same time every night.
• Get up at the same time every morning.
• Keep electronic devices out of the bedroom. This includes cell phones,
  computers and televisions.
• Don’t let pets sleep in your bedroom.
• Avoid drinking caffeine after 2 p.m. It’ll keep you awake!
• If you decide to drink alcohol, do so before 8 p.m. All forms of alcohol shorten the sleep cycle.
• Don’t smoke.
• Avoid napping.

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