Weight Loss

According to scientific researchers, we need to get enough sleep to lose weight and keep it off for good… That’s 7 – 9 hours per night ladies! Get that sleep and rewards you will reap!

WHY?
1) Research shows that if you lack sleep, you make more ghrelin (a hormone that makes us hungry, stimulates our appetites). So people who lack sleep are HUNGRIER!

2) The body’s stress levels increase when you don’t get enough sleep and when you’re stressed you secrete more cortisol (stress hormone). Increased cortisol levels cause you to store more fat around the middle section… BELLY FAT.

3) Sleep deprivation not only makes us stressed, we’re also more likely to be depressed, grumpy, less optimistic… Perfect candidates for some emotional eating! And when you’re exhausted, it’s harder to control your impulses… “Huge bag of potato chips??? Yeah why not!”

4) The longer you stay up, the more time you have to squeeze in an extra snack or two or three… This is especially the case if you are watching TV. One study showed that people who stay up late at night to watch TV tended to eat 500 calories more per day (of high calorie foods) when compared to early sleepers / early risers.

The bottom line is… GET SOME SLEEP!
I’m staying up to write this article for you, so I’m going to take my own advice and I’m going to go to sleep too!

I’m here rooting for you!

— How do we know this actually works?
One of the longest running and largest scale weight loss maintenance trials ever conducted: a Kaiser Permanente study funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health. Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
– 1700 study participants
– 44% African American

Guess what it is..? A FOOD DIARY! 
Now ladies, I’m not saying you’ll need to do this darned boring thing forever! How flipping annoying would that be??! I’m suggesting that self awareness is key. So many of us just aren’t aware of what we really do eat… Some of us remember the main meals we have and totally blank on all the snacking, all the grazing. IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DITCH THOSE POUNDS… for the first few weeks of deciding to change your lifestyle, of deciding to lose weight… just keep a food journal, write down everything you eat (even the stuff you don’t want to write down!). This is time consuming but writing down everything you eat, even for just a few weeks, for many people, can be the key to taking the pounds off and keeping them off.

— “Can writing down what you eat really help you to lose weight?”
According to the leader author of the study (Jack Hollis PhD), “The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost. Those who kept daily food records LOST TWICE AS MUCH WEIGHT as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”

— “But I am on the road a lot, I don’t have a way of keeping a formal journal”
Dr K. Bachman who was also a part of the study said, “Keeping a food diary doesn’t have to be a formal thing. Just the act of scribbling down what you eat on a Post-It note, sending yourself e-mails tallying each meal, or sending yourself a text message will suffice. It’s the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps us become aware of our habits, and hopefully change our behavior.”

So there you have it. Are you willing to ‘sacrifice’ two weeks of your life to food journal to really get self aware and to work out how much food / what you’re actually putting into your body?
I used to be about 70 pounds heavier (approx 32 kilos) and when I started my weight loss journey, I did a food journal for a few weeks so I could work out exactly what I was eating. I have to say it was a darned eye opener! I had been extremely un-self aware. And as I’d been gaining weight steadily over the years, I used to blame the washing machine for shrinking my clothes! I felt blindsided by the constant weight gain, so confused about why / how I was getting fatter and fatter. The food journal helped me to see what I was actually doing. And Knowledge is power baby! 

I’m here rooting for you!