Diet & Exercise Are Not Enough – Get Enough Sleep

  Dawn Wolfe

You attend RydeOn! Spin® classes regularly, you try to watch what you're eating … so why can't you seem to rise above a certain level of health and fitness or lose that last ten pounds?

The answer may be that you're not getting enough sleep. That's the conclusion that many researchers are coming to and which is profiled in this article on the New York Times' web site.

To sum up, the article says that losing even a few hours' sleep a night can lead to increased weight. For one thing, when we're tired we make less healthy food choices because our bodies crave the fuel provided by fats and carbs to give us the energy we didn't get the night (or nights) before.

More alarmingly, research also shows that when our bodies are sleep deprived our fat cells become less sensitive to insulin – a change that is associated with diabetes and obesity.

Of course, our food choices aren't the only decisions that are negatively affected by sleep deprivation. How many times have you decided you were too tired or that you didn't have time to make it to an indoor cycling or other fitness class? Lack of sleep makes it harder to make the commitment to exercising – lack of exercise can then be a factor in having trouble sleeping, and on the cycle goes.

Rather than being on the road to increasingly better health, depriving ourselves of enough sleep keeps us in the sedentary, over-eating rut – and makes it harder to get the full benefits of the spinning and other exercise we are doing.

We'll talk about tips for consistently getting a good nights' sleep in a future blog post. For now, please keep in mind that when it comes to Training for Life, consistent sleep is every bit as important as proper diet and regular exercise.