SLEEP, STRESS AND WEIGHT LOSS...

SLEEP, STRESS AND WEIGHT LOSS - It’s fairly well known that there is a significant link between sleep, stress and weight loss but how much consideration do we put towards the quality of our sleep and the level of our stress when we’re planning and assessing our weight loss journey and our subsequent success? Do we actually realise just how much they contribute and are we taking relevant action to makes improvements when they’re holding us back?

Stress causes an elevation of our stress hormone cortisol who’s job it is to enable us to manage the stress. But when we’re consistently stressed without reprieve, our hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (or HPA axis; the complex system responsible for dealing with stress and producing cortisol) becomes dysfunctional and cortisol levels don’t readily return to a state of calm or recovery. 

The HPA axis is also responsible for our circadian rhythms and our sleep cycles. If our cortisol remains high at night when it should be at it’s lowest it keeps us in a state of alertness at the same time as feeling physically tired from lack of rest. This is the tired and wired feeling one often encounters during times of chronic stress and poor recovery. When the HPA axis is over active it can cause insomnia, frequent waking, interrupted sleep cycles between light, REM and deep stages, long durations of awake and restlessness and shortened overall sleep duration. 

Lack of sleep and imbalanced cortisol levels can affect your moods (hormone production disruption), digestion, metabolism and your immune system. Furthermore stress hormones communicate with your body to conserve energy for fuelling during your stressful and long awake times. 

When we’re overtired and hormonally imbalanced our body will increase blood glucose levels and insulin, in order to help us further cope with the stress. Higher levels of the hormone ghrelin are released to increase appetite and lower levels of the hormone leptin that leads to satiety and feeling full. When the stress for us is not physical and we don’t need the added energy, these spikes in blood sugar and insulin lead to increased hunger and cravings for sugar and reduces our cognitive control of food and leads to unhealthy appetite choices and reduces will-power.

Poor choices lead to weight gain and increased inflammation, and longer term chronic health symptoms. The increased stress and inflammation overtime leads to the storage of visceral and abdominal subcutaneous fatty tissue. This is why we sometimes hear of tummy fat referred to as a ‘stress belly’ or ‘cortisol belly’.

Poor health and chronic stress over a long enough period of time can reduce our training progression and weight loss progress by as much as 50%.

So when we are struggling with our weight loss progress, for sure look at nutrition first, but if dietary choices and training seem to be in a good place, don’t give up! Check your sleep quality and your stress levels. This could be what you’re needing to change. Both play such a huge role in health and weight loss progression and success. 

Sleep well! Stress Less! Be Healthy!