Are you getting enough SLEEP?

• Are you super busy?

• Trying to lose body fat?

• Doing your HIIT workouts?

• Cooking from scratch?

• Buying high quality food and locally sourced products?

YEP, YEP & double YEP.

But talk to me about your sleep?

It’s a MASSIVE component in your quest for fat loss, health, energy & to STOP pesky cravings.

Good quality sleep can be one of the first things to disappear when you’re stressed out, but if you get more sleep, you’ll be happier, healthier, and smarter.

If you sleep less than 7-9 hours a night, you’re not firing on all cylinders.

You’ll find it harder to concentrate & remember stuff.

And….

Your body CRAVES carbs & sugar to keep you propped up though the day.

You wake up tired & stressed, sky rocketing your cortisol & insulin (fat storing hormones) levels before you have even got out of bed!

My advice?

• Transform sleep into a spiritual practice. Take it seriously.

• Try to get as many hours between the sheets as possible.

There are a lot of ways to increase the satisfaction of your sleep.

Ways to Hack Sleep

1: Turn OFF everything electronic: phones, standby mode – EVERYTHING has to be OFF. Electronic devices transmit signals & your brain will pick up on these.

2: SLEEP in pitch black.  This is a hard one for me as I love to wake up with the light streaming in through my window but recent bouts of intense insomnia has put paid to this practise for me.

3: Leave a good 3 / 4 hours after eating before you go to bed.

You really need to have all the food in your system digested well before you retire for the night.

4: If you can’t stop your brain going over ideas and conversations & events etc, try to read fiction before you go to sleep.

5: Eliminate screen time an hour before bed, so no looking at iPhones/iPads which keep the brain alert & active.

Remember your body is resting, restoring, resetting & repairing while asleep and if you are not getting the results you want from your fat loss  programme, have a look at your sleep regimen.

Lack of sleep will encourage your body to hold onto fat stores, especially around your middle.

Sleep and Magnesium

As we age our hormone levels start to decline.

In some cases it has been reported that women in their mid 20s are experiencing a decline in the 3 big sex hormones: testosterone, progesterone and oestrogen.

This has a huge impact on health, fatloss, brain function, mood  and can even change your personality.

But there are ways you can boost your hormone levels through sleep, stress management, nutrition, fitness and supplementation.

The first “BIG ROCK” to address is sleep, and if you are struggling with sleeping there some great tools and interventions you can utilise.

Maybe you get to sleep OK but 1 am sees you WIDE awake running through your to do list, then struggling to get back to sleep and waking up totally shattered?

Or do you struggle getting to sleep with thoughts, situations,
scenarios constantly going through your mind?

A supplement I’ve personally found life changing in the sleep department is magnesium.

Over the last 4 years my sleep has deteriorated terribly.
Waking up at 1am then seeing through 2am and 3 am- this becomes so stressful and 100% leads to mid section weight gain, cravings, mood swings, etc. When my own coach suggested I add magnesium to help with sleep and stress, I decided to try it.

It has made the most amazing difference.

I am now sleeping consistently 7 / 8 hours a night, my stress levels
are coming down, and I feel so much more relaxed and happier.

Magnesium is so underrated.

Magnesium is crucial for more than 300 essential chemical reactions in the body. Without magnesium, these vital reactions simply don’t take place.

Without magnesium, bodily systems malfunction, from bone growth to adrenal health to the ability to fall asleep at night.

Magnesium is most importantly, one of the primary nutrients involved in the regulation of cellular stress and activity.

And when I say stress here, I do mean stress. Any sort of cellular activity is a stress of sorts, because it upregulates activity and requires energy and resources.

Magnesium’s role is to open channels on cell membranes. When a muscle fibre, for example, needs to tense up and become active, magnesium will open the membrane and help usher in calcium, which helps make it tense. Then, when the period of stress is over and the muscle can relax, magnesium opens up the cell membrane to usher the calcium out of the cell again.

The problem for most people is that they have enough magnesium to usher calcium into the cell, but not enough to usher the calcium out.

This leaves them in a chronically up-regulated state, leaving muscles tense, nerves firing, and neurons on high alert. This is why magnesium deficiency is associated with muscle tension, with headaches, with poor adrenal health, and with anxiety and sleep problems.

Without magnesium, the body simply cannot calm down.

Because it has been so life-changing for me personally I’ve decided to formulate my own magnesium supplement, as there are so many different types and strengths it can become confusing.

I’ll let you know more details over the next week but I’d like to hear from you – How much sleep do you get on average most nights?

Send me an email or tweet me- I’d love to know the % of Kick Starters who are chronically sleep deprived.