You didn't read that title wrong. You can literally burn 500 calories in your sleep and I'm about to show you how. Now, in today...
You didn't read that title wrong. You can literally burn 500 calories in your sleep and I'm about to show you how. Now, in today's article we're going to get a little bit science with simple words, cause I'm not a scientist. (chuckles) We're going to do some math with a calculator, because math. And I'm going to show you exactly how easy it is to burn 500 or more calories in your sleep. We need to talk about your BMR. (chuckles) What's your BMR? It's your basal metabolic rate. And honestly, that's just like a fancy way of saying the number of calories that you burn while you're resting. It's the word that people are talking about when they use the generic term metabolism. It's related to but not exactly the same as the calculation for the number of calories you should be eating for weight loss.
So a higher BMR means that you are eating more calories and
still losing weight. It's different for everybody and it's based on your age,
your height, your current weight and your fitness level which basically,
they're talking about muscle mass as well as your gender, which means that in
general, a man's BMR is going to be higher than a woman's. Generally speaking,
they are bigger, generally speaking, they have more muscle. Obviously that's
not the same for every man and every woman, but in general, that's how that
works. And our metabolism, our BMR, actually goes down as we age, as your body
gets slightly less efficient. This is why, I mean, totally this is a
generalization, but this is why your husband and your kids can eat more and
still lose weight. So the more you weight, the higher your BMR, which means
that if your starting weight is higher, you need to eat more in order to lose
weight but even as you lose weight, your BMR might stay the same, or even
increase because of increases in muscle mass if you are exercising regularly.
So yes, what I'm telling you is that exercising regularly boosts your
metabolism. But you know what else does? Getting a good night's sleep.
Now we're going to do some math. I have my calculator
because I'm not trying to do this in my head at all. An average woman's BMR is
1,500. Yours might be higher, it might be lower, this is just an average. And
that means that over the course of 24 hours she is burning about 62 and-a-half
calories every hour, which means that if she's getting eight hours of sleep, boom,
you just burned 500 calories. No jumping, no equipment, probably no sweating,
unless you're having night sweats, that's a totally different issue. (chuckles)
But that's crazy, right? I mean, I know most of us only think about the
calories that we're burning when we're exercising, but your beautiful,
miraculous, amazing body is actually burning calories every minute of every day
and a good night's sleep, I mean, in addition to burning the 500 calories, it's
also performing all kinds of really critical functions that support your weight
loss. While we sleep, our bodies are repairing our muscle tissue, they're
regulating hormones and it's also clearing toxins from our brain. When you
don't get enough sleep, you simply cannot operate at peak efficiency. Your body
loves to be efficient, like that's one of its biological imperatives but when
you aren't getting enough sleep, it can't, which means that it has to figure
out how to kind of reserve resources from some pretty critical functions.
Things like hunger control, mood regulation, blood sugar mobilization and
higher-level cognitive decision-making.
So yes, what I'm saying here is that if you don't get a good
night's sleep, you will be hungry, crabby, too tired to exercise, and probably
not making very good decisions. Yikes. Now, thankfully the fix for this is
incredibly simple. Go to bed and get your sleep. But I know that's going to
lead you to ask me how to get a good night's sleep and here's the great news.
If you are working on weight loss, you're already on the right path. The other
four elements of "The Five-Oh! Method," eating the right number of
calories, drinking the right amount of water, exercising moderately and
managing your mindset, they all work together for not just weight loss, but to
support the other elements. So when you're fueling and hydrating properly and
exercising regularly and managing your mindset, it's actually easier to get a
good night's sleep. And when you're getting a good night's sleep it's easier to
fuel and hydrate properly, to exercise regularly and to manage your mindset.
All five of the elements work together for each other and they all work for
weight loss.
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