Importance of a good night's rest

Night rest is one of the most underestimated aspects of nutrition. The truth is that an adequate rest at night has invaluable benefits during the process of weight loss and muscle mass gain. Today we have numerous studies that highlight how a small change in the amount of hours we sleep daily can have a considerable influence on our weight loss goals.

For an endomorph body, all factors are equally important, because we are directly fighting against a body type that by its very nature tends to put on weight. We propose you to delve into the study of the following topic, to know all the benefits that revolve around proper rest. Influence of sleep at a hormonal level: The quality of our rest directly affects us at a hormonal level, when we rest properly hormones such as leptin are produced and others such as ghrelin decrease. To understand the importance of these two hormones and how they can influence our diet, it is enough to know that leptin is one of the hormones that has more incidence in the decrease of appetite, therefore when we rest for a long time, the sensation of hunger decreases notably during the day.

Ghrelin, on the other hand, is one of the hormones most responsible for the stimulation of appetite. That is why it is popularly known as the hunger hormone. Taking this into account, sleeping less can in principle sabotage our diet, increasing hunger and making it extremely complex for us to comply with our diet plan with discipline. Food perception: One of the fundamental reasons why people become addicted to carbohydrates is because of that feeling of pleasure that stimulates our brain, generating dopamine, when we taste foods rich in sugar and diversity of flavors. Carbohydrates are addictive, and this is scientifically proven, which is why a strict carbohydrate diet is very difficult to sustain over time.

What is relevant here is that sleeping less affects the area of the brain in charge of food perception. It makes us instinctively more conditioned to seek foods rich in carbohydrates, finding little pleasure in eating meats and vegetables. All this in search of the rewards associated with the perception of the food we eat, which is why little sleep will directly attempt against the pleasure of eating low-carbohydrate foods and will cause us to be emotionally indisposed at all times to continue our diet, being much more likely to end up abandoning it and returning to our old eating habits. Influence on metabolism: Lack of sleep has a direct influence on our metabolism. For example, it has been shown that glucose absorption decreases alarmingly when we do not get enough sleep. This is produced by the direct effect on the insulin that we generate when we eat food, so if we affect the capacity of the generated insulin to work on glucose, we can have very negative consequences such as overweight, tendency to obesity, diabetes and many other diseases.

The generated glucose surplus does not disappear, on the contrary, it mutates into increased fat storage. If by nature, an endomorph body tends to accumulate fat, by adding lack of sleep the only thing we achieve is to accelerate this process of fat accumulation, negatively affecting any attempt to diet that seeks to combat fat stored unnecessarily.

As you may have noticed, too little sleep significantly affects your health and your diet programs. Not only is it enough to properly organize your diet and exercise plan, but you must accompany it with adequate rest at night. It does not consist of sleeping little at night and trying to recover it during the weekends, this is a day to day issue, sleeping well on weekends will only help you on those days, but the rest of the week you will spend it presenting the patterns described above. So sleeping well should be a daily goal.