Get the better sleep that helps fat loss.....

Today's post:  Thursday, 4-27-2017

1.  Enough good quality sleep helps people lose fat and keep it off in several ways:

*You feel enough better you are more able to make an extra effort and persist in doing the other effective things that help fat loss and keep it off.

*Good quality sleep we now know literally cleans the brain.  So you think better the next day and even are far less likely to get Alzheimer’s. This makes getting effective exercise and eating foods that help you stay healthy and lean easier.  It makes saying no to food that harm your health or fatten you much easier.

In fact, getting enough good quality sleep has been shown to reduce excess hunger and cravings!

*Your body releases more growth hormone and testosterone when you get enough quality sleep.

So you can use effective strength training and short, vigorous cardio to lose fat. And you are better able to keep the bone and muscle you already have to prevent age related fat gain.

2.  Commitments & responsibilities, exercise, worthwhile work, & learning and good quality recreation mean that healthy vital people can have trouble sleeping a lot more hours.

3.  But there are dozens of ways to get better quality sleep anyway.

They are all well tested to work.  Doing several of them every day can often be very effective.

Even better, many of the most effective ones are easy and cheap enough to do, you can make them happen right away!

*Doing at least some vigorous exercise each morning almost every day before breakfast and before work -- directly helps fat loss and health protection of course.  But doing it that time of day makes it reliable and much easier to continue. 

Best of all people who do this tend to fall asleep reliably within minutes most days.  They get better sleep with more growth hormone and testosterone release.  And, they stay asleep all night except for bathroom breaks more often also.

*Think through and try out what time of day works best for you to get up each day.  If you can, set your alarm clock for that exact same time each day.  Then when your alarm goes off, get up and start your day no matter what. 

I have a set of things I do each morning right after I get up that I try to do as few minutes after I get up as possible. Brewing and drinking my first cup of coffee is on that list.  I aim to drink it within 15 minutes of when the alarm goes off. 

It can be challenging some weekends to get up at the same time you do during the week.  But I’ve found doing so gives me more unrushed weekend time now that I do it.

*I saw a doctor who specializes in sleep issues.  Two of the most useful things she suggested DO work. 

a) Drink any red wine or other alcohol before dinner only!

This one does a nice double I’ve found.  By the time you fix your dinner or it arrives in a restaurant, you feel mellow and less stressed.  Then after dinner enough of the alcohol is processed you are less groggy and more able to converse and do things.

This strategy also makes avoiding enough wine etc to be helpful in preventing it from stopping or reversing your fat loss.  After I started doing it, I found I was able to drink about 8 to 10 less glasses of red wine a month and maintain the lower intake.

b) Drink any coffee or tea by 6 to 8 hours before you go to bed most days. I now do that almost every day.  And, on the days I do it, I do sleep better and feel better rested the next day.

I also recently discovered a bonus to this.  Since I hardly ever drink coffee just before or after dinner, if on occasion I need to be more awake and productive after dinner the coffee I drink seems to work better!

*Get a sleep mask and use it every night.

Moving to a nice cabin far from city or freeway lights or getting 100% effective blackout curtains can make your bedroom dark enough for good sleep.  But you may not be able to do this in a few days or at all.

But buying a sleep mask on Amazon for less than $20 and wearing it every night can do the same and you can be doing it a few days from now!

I got the Nidra sleep mask and wear it every night.  The results were so good, when I realized my first one began to wear out after over a year of every day wear, I bought a second one that I’m now using.

It’s also nice because I can take it off in seconds since I’m wearing it if I need or want to see.  I a room totally dark from blackout curtains, I’d need a flashlight that I could grab reliably and it would still take longer.

*Take a chewable melatonin supplement just before bed, so it goes directly into your blood stream from the mucous membranes in your mouth.  That way by the time you put on your sleep mask and get into bed, it’s taking effect.

If you are below 45 or 50, you may find that half of a 1 mg chewable melatonin is enough to be effective without making you groggy the next morning while more is too much.

But if you are over 65 or 70, a 2.5 mg chewable may be more effective and give you other health benefits.

*Wear cloth gloves and soft socks to bed.  This has been found to relax and open up your blood vessels and help you get to sleep and stay asleep.

*Keep your sleeping area cool.  Temperatures in the 63 to 69 degree range a and light blanket &/or wearing a hooded sweatshirt test as giving the best results.

 BUT this one can be a BIG problem to do for many people!

In the Silicon Valley here many homes have little insulation and no air conditioning.  Particularly now that global warming has been keeping it from cooling off at night at it once did, this makes for a hot and sweaty bedroom.

And, in places like San Diego, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Tuscon, or Oklahoma City it can be very expensive to cool your bedroom that much in the summer!

What if you could get your bed to that temperature for $150 so you could do it at all in the Silicon Valley or for much lower costs in hot places with A/C?

An upgrade of an effective product to do just that is about to become available:

Better, cheaper, and smaller than AC way to cool a hot bedroom!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-bfan-for-a-cooler-more-restful-nights-sleep#/?ref=FundedToday&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=51dsa.fnd.to

This product is quieter than their original product.  In fact, it is an upgrade for a product that WAS successful in helping people get better sleep!

The price is reasonable!  It will sell for about $150; but in this pre-launch period, you can order it for less than that.  It will be shipped between mid-June and mid-July it looks like.

4.  NEVER take a prescription “sleeping pill.”  These hypnotic drugs are the very worst possible combination of disasters you can imagine!

The “sleep” they cause is very low quality and delivers none of the benefits of real sleep.

They are as addictive as heroin or cocaine for many people.  Taking them for just two or three days has caused ruined sleep and continuing high drug costs for many people!

There is a direct death rate increase in people who take them.  People taking them have driven while hypnotically asleep into concrete pillars on the freeway and one man sleep-walked nude into a below zero blizzard and froze to death.

And, if they don’t do that, they may kill you as certainly but more slowly.  People who begin to take them have their rate of death from cancer and heart disease and any other cause more than double just after they start taking them.

When you can do much more so fast for less money and get good quality sleep too, this seems like a very bad idea to me!