The Sleep Diet

The key to losing weight may not be what you’re eating or your amount of exercise. Sleep and breast milk shows they play a much bigger part in the weight rollercoaster. Check out The Sleep Diet. 

Thank you Douglas Laboratories for sponsoring this post. I was selected for this opportunity by Douglas Laboratories and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

Ever heard something so many times, but it didn’t make a difference in anything you did? You know – like that moment you tell your kid something and he runs off in the total different direction after you just said don’t?

But then one day, it hits you like a ton of bricks? 

News alert: Sleep is important. 

Shocker, right?!? (Read the sarcasm here.) 

While we all might know it, goodness knows I’ve preached it: from how sleep affects our parenting skills as well as our health. I even went on TV to share tips on how to find the best mattress. While I knew that sleep was important, I wasn’t doing much to get more. Ironically I was working on those posts on about three hours of sleep. 

Then I was asked to join a special luncheon presentation by Dr. Penny Kendall-Reed recently in Dallas. She was speaking before several practitioners about “A Neuroendocrine Approach to Metabolic Balance” during the annual American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) Symposium.

Dr. Kendall-Reed is a specialist in metabolic and neuro-endocrine health, and author of the best-selling “The New Naturopathic Diet” and many other works. She travels throughout Canada and the United States lecturing on metabolic and endocrine function, holds health retreats, and appears regularly on television, magazine and radio. Presently, Dr. Kendall-Reed is the director of natural therapies at the Urban Wellness Clinic in Toronto and acts as a Medical Advisor to Douglas Laboratories.

While normally this isn’t type of event I’m known to attend, I was so interested to hear not just the importance of sleep, but the impact it makes in regards to STRESS and WEIGHT. 

If there were two words that I know a lot about (like many middle-aged parents), it’s stress and weight.

It’s no secret that I’ve had an ongoing battle to find a healthy weight balance. I’ve tried lots of things and some have been successful for me too. However, after awhile, I’m back to my old routine – not so much eating poorly as much as back to the grind of working non-stop, no exercise, no sleep and basically no routine. 

As for sleep in general, I’ve always treated it as a luxury. Something that people did who didn’t have enough to do. Who weren’t working hard enough. And now with my stress load, taking 8 hours in my day to sleep just gets in the way of me getting everything done. 

While the title of the presentation may have been a little overwhelming, the facts in Dr. Kendall-Reed’s presentation were clear. 

1 hour less of sleep a night reduces melatonin (the hormone that helps regulate our natural clock) and stimulates cortisol (the “stress hormone” that monitors the body’s way of handling fear/stress.)

When you don’t sleep, your leptin levels (the hormone that tells your brain when you’re full and you have enough energy) decrease, making your body THINK, you need more food to get moving. 

When you’re tired, you feel hungry because gherlin (a hormone that is released in the stomach that increases your appetite) is released making you feel like you’re hungry even if you don’t.) 

So basically, when you don’t sleep, your body can’t do what it’s meant to do: that 7-8 hours your body needs sleep to complete the restorative cycles necessary for good health.  And when you don’t sleep, you’re actually forcing your body to work against its own functions, causing you to gain weight. 

Great…All this time I thought if I was running myself ragged it meant that I was getting more done…was a total lie. 

Of course, there was a lot of information shared by Dr. Kendall-Reed that was fascinating – not just the facts, but also countless case studies. Research she shared showed that increasing sleep with a small modification in diet and the use of nutritional supplements (not prescriptions), were creating positive effects (like weight loss), in people in less than 30 days. 

Yep, sleep was helping people to lose weight. 

Now I was motivated to get moving on this “sleep diet.

One of the main nutritional supplements used with the “sleep diet,” Sereniten Plus, contains a special blend including Lactium®, an ingredient of natural origin made from milk proteins, first found in breast milk as researchers observed the calming effect on babies who were breastfed. (Once again the power of the female breast prevails!)

With a daily Sereniten Plus, 7-8 hours of sleep, and some slight changes like monitoring wine consumption to one a night, can actually make the LBS come off?

We’ll just have to see. Everyone’s different and of course, that whole sleeping thing is the other part of the equation to making those stress AND weight level decrease.

Bottom line: sleep isn’t something you get to do…it’s something you have to do. And with the help of Sereniten Plus, you might actually relearn the joys of healthy living.

Now this is a diet we all need to jump on. 

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.