How much sleep are you getting per night? It may not be enough.

In a recent post I called ‘Why You Didn’t Build Muscle In 2015‘, I put the number 1 issue as…

You’re not getting enough sleep.

I didn’t put it as no.1 because it’s the most crucial factor, but because it’s unbelievably common in today’s world for people to be chronically under-slept. Then we “caffeine up” several times a day to overcome our physical and mental lethargy (the added caffeine helping to further elevate stress/catabolic hormones throughout the day).

So why is it important to muscle-building? A lack of sleep causes increases in catabolic/stress hormones and suppresses the release of muscle-building anabolic hormones.

 

 

But it doesn’t end there. The title of this article states that sleep deprivation may actually be making you fat.

So how does that work?

It seems that lack of sleep makes us hungrier and leaves us craving high-calorie foods.

It does this by altering the hormones in our body.

Remember that hormones are the masters. It’s our hormones that dictate where our food/energy goes in our body. For example, pregnant women experience elevated levels of insulin; this makes them store more of their incoming calories as body fat (even if they ate the same number of total calories as before pregnancy).

Our hormones can also tell us when we are full and make us want to stop eating. And lastly, they can also make us hungry. Here’s a study…

A study [1] entitled ‘Short sleep duration increases energy intakes but does not change energy expenditure in normal-weight individuals’ found that a short sleep of ~4 hours saw women eat 15% more calories per day, and men around 9% extra calories.

This averaged out at about 300 extra daily calories consumed (compared to when the study subjects slept 9 hours per night).

 

An interesting point here is that energy expenditure (calories out) did not change at all, despite the fact of being awake for 5 extra hours.

So ‘Calories in’ was up 300 | ‘Calories out’ did not change

That’s pretty huge. In just 10 days that would be almost an extra pound of body fat (300 x 10 = 3000. There are 3500 Calories in 1 pound of body fat).

That’s fast weight gain and makes a compelling case for adequate sleep (in addition to my first argument above about sleep and muscle-building).

Sleep deprivation can cause you to eat an extra 300 cals/day, making you fat fast. Click here Share on X

 

So how much sleep are you getting per night?

I average about 7 hours, which seems to work well for me.

Let me know in the comments below. And if you have any tips for a better night’s sleep, I’d love to hear them 🙂 If you’d like more on this, there’s some more info on sleep deprivation and fat gain here at Men’s Fitness and Science.HowStuffWorks.

And if you’re at a point now where you need to cut fat quickly, see my fat loss plan here.

 

If you have any questions about your training, get in touch with me below. Or consider booking me for a 1-on-1 consultation via Skype.

And also add me on social media here…

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Oh and I posted up my first article on my new HappyHack project yesterday. It’s about how a 19th century slave helped me give up hatred. It’ll only take 1 minute to read and I’d love you to take a look at it. Thanks.

 

NOTE: Pack on muscle mass fast with FREE THT training. Whether you need to know how many sets to do, how often to train a body, the best exercises to use, it’s all covered here! You can download the full and free THT training program right now and start packing on mass like these guys did. You don’t have to go to your email to confirm anything. Once you click the button, you’ll be taken straight to the download page 😀 I operate a ‘Strictly Zero Spam‘ policy.

 

Train With Intensity!

Mark

Reference: [1] Short sleep duration increases energy intakes but does not change energy expenditure in normal-weight individuals. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Aug;94(2):410-6. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.111.013904. Epub 2011 Jun 29. St-Onge MP1, Roberts AL, Chen J, Kelleman M, O’Keeffe M, RoyChoudhury A, Jones PJ.