Wow! I had so much feedback from last week’s blog. The common theme was around sleeping 8+ hours with the use of prescription sleep medication, still feeling tired and dieting but not losing weight.
You would think if someone is getting enough sleep and restricting their caloric intake, they should lose weight, right?
Well, not necessarily.
If you are taking a prescription sleep medication and trying to lose weight by dieting, two things are going on that are unnatural.
First is restrictive dieting. It is unnatural simply because it is unsustainable, can cause weight gain, is nutritionally unbalanced and programmed for failure.
Sure, in the first days of a low-calorie diet you may quickly lose 5+ pounds. At first glance you are encouraged, thinking hey this diet really works. Unfortunately, most of the weight lost in the first few days and weeks of a diet is water and muscle, not fat. It takes several weeks of restrictive dieting to really start losing fat.
And if that isn’t bad enough, when you diet your body plays a nasty trick on you by slowing down your metabolism by as much as 20 percent. You see your body can’t really tell the difference between a diet and a famine. Your brain thinks there is a famine because it’s not getting the nourishment it needs to be healthy and, it thinks there’s a crisis because it is stressed. So, if that goes on long enough, your brain gives your metabolism a signal to slow down and hold on to fat (especially in the midsection). This is one reason why so many dieters hit a plateau several weeks into a diet, finding that their weight won’t budge on their low-calorie diet that melted away that weight in the beginning.
Then, when you go off your restrictive diet and start eating again, your metabolism doesn’t rev back up very quickly if at all. So, you gain weight more easily now, even if you are eating fewer calories than before you started your diet.
Restrictive dieting or fasting just makes your body more efficient at storing fat, which makes it easier to gain weight. So, ditch that diet mentality and start eating nutrient dense foods that will help you heal the symptoms of your stagnant metabolism. You can watch my training on that here.
Sleep medications are unnatural because of their sedative effect which prevents deep sleep. Deep sleep is when your brain begins producing slower delta waves so your body can heal and build up energy for the next day. If you aren’t getting enough deep sleep, you may not feel rested and your body won’t heal from the lack of nourishment as a result of restrictive dieting.
When you combine a restrictive diet and lack of deep sleep, you have the perfect recipe for an unhealthy metabolism.
If you want to heal your metabolism so you can begin to lose weight you need to get natural sleep and ditch the restrictive diets.
Last week I shared my sleep tips. If you didn’t download them, you can do so here. You can also find the tools that I use to induce natural sleep, on my Amazon Influencer page under sleep tools.
Want to learn how to heal your metabolism so you can lose weight naturally? Click here and let’s talk about my 1-1 coaching program.
Well that’s it for today….
Talk to you soon,
BTW: If you are not familiar with an Amazon Influencer page, is part of the Amazon Associates Program which is a means for people like me to earn commission for recommending and linking products. If you order anything through Healthy Method’s Influencer page, there isn’t any difference in price and you get to feel good knowing that you are buying something that I recommend.