Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I want to ask you a question: Are you focusing on your diet and movement but still not seeing the results you want in your weight loss journey? It might be time to think about two often-neglected, yet very crucial aspects in your journey: sleep and hydration. I mentioned these last week just a little bit, and I want to expound upon it today because I think they're so important and we don’t think they’re important. We think, “Oh yeah, I’ll get enough sleep. Oh yeah, I’ll increase my water,” and we really don’t understand how vital they are to our weight loss. So, I wanted to talk about it a little bit today. Let’s talk about sleep first. Poor sleep is noted to be less than seven hours a night, okay? So, if you have less than seven hours a night, multiple studies show that that has been linked to a higher BMI and weight gain. So, why does this happen? Well, we talk about how it affects our cortisol. We increase our cortisol if we don’t get enough sleep. It also affects our hunger hormones. So, if you go back a few episodes and listen to that episode about Crellin and Leptin, these are important here. Ghrelin is our hunger hormone, right? That’s our growling hormone. That’s the one that tells us that we’re hungry. And then Leptin is the one that says we’ve had enough; it kind of suppresses our hunger a little bit. Cortisol we talked about as well, okay? So, when we do not get enough sleep, it increases our Ghrelin, decreases our Leptin, and we already know it increases our cortisol, which does the same thing—increases hunger, decreases satiety. Poor sleep can also decrease your self-control and your decision-making abilities and increase that dopamine response to food, right? So, what a triple whammy, right? We haven’t had enough sleep so we’re not firing on all cylinders; we might’ve made some good plans but we have less control over new data, right? We have less control over new temptations, and then our decision-making is not quite right. So, we might even forget why we made this plan to eat healthy food today; like all that’s out the window. And then when we actually eat that food, we get more dopamine than we normally would, and that is what keeps us coming back for more and more and more. So, they did this in a study. They had lovely gentlemen, 16 men. They either let them sleep for eight hours or they kept them awake all night. Then they did a computer-based test where they had to select portion sizes and different foods, and the ones that stayed awake all night selected bigger portions, and they said they were hungrier. And when they measured it, they did have higher levels of Ghrelin or the hunger hormone, right? So, we’re up all night, we not only want the sugary foods, we get a high from the sugary foods; we instinctively want a bigger portion because our hunger hormone Ghrelin is like “eat more, eat more,” right? And I hate this. Look, I love sleep. My husband makes fun of me all the time; I could sleep for 11 hours a night and be super happy. So, if I get less than nine hours of sleep, I feel like this is me. Some of us—I remember I still exercise and my scale of how much exercise counts when you are super tired, like when I used to be on call or even now when I’m on call, if I’m up a lot during the night and I go exercise, I decided that doesn’t count, right? So, if I do 30 minutes exercise, obviously that’s an hour, right, in our scale? And I, all of you ladies and gentlemen that take call or you’re up all night with babies or whatever, that exercise counts double. If you need to know if it counts triple, you can send me a message and I will approve all those requests, okay? The bummer of this is that when we go to that exercise, it actually messes with our fat loss, muscle loss. So, if we lose weight, we’re actually losing more weight from muscle than fat if we haven’t slept long enough. This does not stink, right? So, they did a study. They let people sleep, not sleep; they put them through exercise. You might lose the same amount of weight, but if you have not slept, your body is tapping into your muscles instead of your fat for that weight loss. So how do we get good sleep? This is the most important thing, right? We know how bad it is if we don’t get sleep, so how can we get better sleep? We talked a little bit about stress last week or a lot about stress last week. If you are not sleeping because your mind is racing because you are stressed, there are a few things we can do. We can tell ourselves to stop. We can actually go on a worry diet. I know I’ve mentioned that before where we just decide we’re not gonna worry anymore. If that is too much and your brain is like, “No, absolutely, we are. We don’t believe you,” you can schedule time on your calendar to worry so that when your brain is racing in the middle of the night or when you’re trying to go to bed, you can tell your brain, “Don’t worry about it. We don’t need to worry about this now. We don’t have to think about this now. We have scheduled time tomorrow at 9 a.m. We have 30 minutes where we can worry—or an hour, whatever you wanna do.” That might work here. The other thing we can do is if we’ve had something stressful happen, maybe we need to write about that—a sort of a thought download—just everything that happened about it that day, write it down and put it to the side. Again, that way, we can remind our brain we’ve sort of processed that, so we don’t need to worry about it right now, so we can process it now, we can process it later with a date on the calendar, or if it’s something that really doesn’t need to be processed, we can kind of tell our brain, “Don’t worry about it. Like, we’re not gonna worry tonight. We’re just gonna go to sleep.” But back to sleep hygiene. When I was training, it’s part of lifestyle medicine now, which I love. So, how can we get the best sleep when we actually get to sleep? I know you’re gonna hate me for this. We need to get rid of screens, okay? You need to not be on your phone right before you go to bed. I know everyone likes to just check that last email or just check that last text message, one last thing on Twitter, one last thing on TikTok, one last video—whatever it is. If you can’t give me an hour, give me 20 minutes. Twenty minutes before bed, turn off the phone. I would love if you could sleep with your phone in a different room. Now, I know that’s not practical for some people and it also may be practical, but your brain is telling you it’s not because it’s addicted to the phone, so it wants it there. But if you could sleep with your phone out of your room, that’s even better. But at least maybe like in a drawer next to your bed where that light is not going to come anywhere near you while you’re sleeping. That light absolutely disrupts your circadian rhythm, and it makes it hard to get a really quality, good night sleep. You want your room to be cold—60 to 71 degrees. That is where they studied and said that’s the best. You wanna sleep in a nice, dark, cold room. A sound machine—now, the sound machine is to prevent you from being woken up in the middle of the night by external noises. So, it’s not that it allows you to sleep. It really is to prevent you from being disturbed by external noises while you’re already trying to get deep sleep. Sometimes a therapy can help if that’s something that feels good to you. No caffeine after lunch. Now, I actually go caffeine-free. That freaks people out. I get the best sleep because I don’t drink caffeine. When I do choose to drink caffeine, I’m very careful to try and not drink it past 2 o’clock. So, I’m gonna give you a late lunch on this: limit your caffeine after late lunch. So, after 2 o’clock, no more caffeine. Limit alcohol. As we get older, any of you ladies at my age—I’m gonna be 50 soon—every glass of alcohol absolutely disrupts my sleep—100%. I have some clients that have the aura rings, so if you have one of these rings or you’ve been thinking about treating yourself to one, every one of them notices if they have alcohol, they do not get the same quality of sleep that they do if they don’t have alcohol. So, we might think it helps me go to sleep, but your actual sleep quality while your eyes shut is not as good as if you didn’t have any alcohol. The other thing is to reduce clutter. But the clutter in your room will affect your stress, will affect your cortisol, and it just being there kind of doesn’t let your mind be as peaceful and restful as it should. So, that is—those are some ways to get some good quality sleep. The other thing I want to talk about for just a minute is how important water is. When—if you are thirsty, you are dehydrated. So, if you are thirsty, you’re already probably three bottles of water down, meaning you need to get three bottles of water in just to sort of get back to baseline. And then if you’ve been doing any exercise or anything like that, you’re gonna need more. If you are not drinking enough water, your body will growl to get you to eat to try and soak the water out of the food. We cannot go that long without water; we can go much longer without food. But sometimes that hunger, that growling, that feeling is really our body trying to get water. So, what are some fun ways? You can set reminders on your phone, you can go buy yourself a new fancy cup. Everyone loves their Stanley cups right now, right? Get some cup—everyone’s carrying cups around; it’s very fashionable now. It didn’t used to be, so like the end thing is carrying a water bottle around, absolutely. There’s no reason you can’t carry one around. You can just find ways to sneak it in. I’ll give you a couple. First of all, I recommend you go to—have a glass of water by your bed at night, and when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you get up to go to the bathroom, come back, drink some of that water. And what I want you to do first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up is finish that nighttime water. We call it night-night water here. Little kids, finish your night-night water. As soon as you wake up, then drink another glass of water. If you’re taking any medicines, drink a cup of water between coffees, right? If you have two cups of coffee, have a glass of water in between. If you drink your water and you drink water with your medicine, you’re already in for the day, like, you’re—so you’re rock-and-rolling. Then if we drink a glass with breakfast, we drink a glass with lunch, we drink a glass in the afternoon, right, we carry a Stanley cup and put it in our car, we drink on our ride home, have a glass at dinner, and then a glass by bedside at night, you were getting a good amount of water. I noticed that I was thirsty—this is a few years ago, before I started taking better control of my health and nutrition, and I, out of curiosity, did an assessment of what I was actually drinking during the day, and there was a day I had zero water, not one. I had lots of coffee, I think I was still drinking soda then, so there was probably a Diet Coke in there, and I had some wine, so I had plenty of liquids, but I did not have any water. And that’s when I knew I needed to change things up a bit; that was not healthy to have zero glasses of water a day. So, I just told you had to sneak in about six glasses of water. So, if you’re at zero, we don’t need to go to six, right? If we’re at zero, let’s just add one, let’s try the night-night water, okay, or our medicine water or just water in our car on the way home. Find a way to sneak one cup of water in. And I love the idea of setting an alarm on your phone. If this is something you wanna work towards, I want to tell you—I know I give you little tidbits every week, but if you’re trying to lose weight, I really want you to consider picking one thing to start with. So, if it’s water, find a way to just get one glass in. If you wanna do sleep, find a way to get a little bit better sleep. If it’s a little less sugar, a little less stress, whatever it is, let’s just find one thing—one thing to work on. And then once we’re kind of rolling with that, we can add something else in: water, sleep, stress, sugar—just pick one. You will see an amazing impact if you pick one of those things. It’s not about going to the gym 100 hours a week; it’s not about eating air sandwiches and like dry lettuce. Just cut back on the sugar, drink some water, get a good night’s sleep, and start managing your mind around stress. Take care of yourself, mindfulness, and self-care. That’s the key. All right, I hope this was useful. I hope you got something out of it. Please share with a friend if you did, review, write, subscribe to the podcast—all those good things. And I will see you next week. Bye.