The Importance of Sleep for Weight Management

Sleep is one of the most fundamental bodily processes. It allows the body to rest and recover from the pressures and stresses of the day, as well as to prepare for the day ahead. One of the most important jobs sleep does is producing hormones that will be needed for the next day. After a person wakes, the hormones their body produced during sleep help regulate all kinds of processes, performing functions from providing energy to stabilizing mood to processing nutrients and converting food into energy. It is perhaps the last of these functions that is the least appreciated, especially within the context of weight loss. Most modern weight loss advice revolves around the “calories in, calories out” model, and while that model certainly has merit, especially for those whose hormones are balanced, there are quite a few more factors involved in the process than the model suggests. Read more…