Are you tired, demotivated and hungry? You need more sleep.
I know that sleep is very necessary to being awake during the day. I also have heard that it is needed to properly lose weight and build muscle. Without sleep you body is just to tired and worn out to be strong and slim. I wish I would have listened to myself earlier. For the past week I have been forcing myself to go to sleep my 12:00 midnight. Midnight is the latest I could be awake until. I also forced myself to wake up at 7:00. I was making sure to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep a night. What a difference it made.
You can see my current sleep habits from above, so let me give you a back ground in my old sleep habits. I would usually go to bed only when I was completely exhausted. I would stay up watching TV or Surfing the interned until about 2:00 of 3:00 in the morning. Then I would crash. I would get up in the morning after about 5 or 6 snooze alarms and go straight to work at about 8:30. This was my routine. Let me tell you, it was not working out. I was tired all day, I would eat a huge breakfast to try and get energy. I would get a Large Coffee from starbucks and just be a zombie all day. The coffee would stave off my hunger, but when it wore off I would gorge on fast food for lunch. I would be in a food coma for the rest of the day. I would hardly eat dinner due to the large lunch. Then came gym time. I say time because the time came and went. I was up for hours, and then I repeated the routine. I think I figured out where the weight came from.
I decided to reevaluate my sleep patterns when I decided to lose the weight. I had always heard fitness folks talking about waking up at 5:00 in the morning and going running. They are trim and fit, so it might be worth it. I picked 7:00 because 5:00 is just too early. 7:00 also gives me enough time to get a 30 minute walk in every morning before work. I picked midnight to go to sleep just because I want 7 hours of sleep. It is basically arbitrary. I knew it would take time to adjust so I was prepared for that. I had previously trained myself to wake up early, so this was really just remembering that. It took me one week to get used to the routine.
Today is the first day that waking going to bed and waking up was like clockwork. I was out like a light at 11:45 and up at 7:00 sharp and walked for 30 minutes. I had watermelon for breakfast with a medium coffee. I had vegetable soup for lunch and a bean burrito (home made) for dinner. I then walked for another hour or so. I was not hungry all day, I only ate what I needed and I had the energy to walk over 4 miles. It is awesome!
Thought the week I could feel myself building in energy. It started out sluggish but better that before. Each day got a little better. I’m sure that my better eating habits and exercise contributed enormously to this feeling, but I firmly believe it would not last without proper sleep. Being well rested lifted my motivation by leaps and bounds. If I feel this much better while still being overweight, I can’t wait until I lose more.
Get more sleep… it is great!
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