Jenn's Losing It

How to get better, longer sleep-it can help you succeed! What is quality sleep?  You know it when you wake up:  It's the feeling your body has had enough time to be truly rested and replenished.  As with eating well and moving more, getting enough sleep contributes to a healthier lifestyle.  Research has shown that regularly getting enough sleep can improve your mood and your overall well being.  While sleep needs vary from person to person- logging seven to nine hours of shut-eye each night seems to be the sweet spot for most adults.  Not only is getting enough sleep good for you, not getting enough sleep has been linked to overeating and weight gain.  Personally I know this to be true, I crave all the sweets and carbs when I haven't gotten enough sleep.  It's the worst feeling, you are trying to make up for the sleep deprivation with the very things that make you crash!  They say that inadequate rest can make it harder to stick to a...

Of course nights are great for going on dates, binge-watching Netflix, doing work, chatting on the phone—you name it. But you know what  else  they're great for? Setting yourself up for bigger and better weight-loss results. Just follow these tips to get yourself that much closer to your goal weight. Have a Low-Sodium Dinner "If you want to wake up feeling less bloated, definitely skip the Chinese dinner," says Keri Gans, R.D., author of  The Small Change Diet . What happens is the salt stays in your system overnight, so you wake up puffier than you normally would. The best option is to cook a healthy meal of steamed veggies and a lean protein—neither of which should be loaded with salt. Do a Nighttime Workout You know that sweating can help you drop pounds, but you may think that exercising too close to bedtime can keep you up at night. Luckily, that's not true; a 2013 survey from the National Sleep Foundation found that active people are 56 to 67 percent more likel...

If only you could work off the calories from that froyo you had earlier while passed out on the couch. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it may not be that far off:  Turning down the thermostat while you sleep could help rev up your metabolism , according to a new study conducted by the National Institute of Health Clinical Center. For the study, 31 healthy people slept in either a 75-degree room or a 66-degree room. Researchers found that the colder sleepers burned more than 7 percent more calories than the warm sleepers—likely because their bodies were working to raise their core body temperature to a stable 98.6 degrees, says study author Francesco Saverio Celi, MD, MHSc, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease. If you lowered the thermostat to 66 degrees at bedtime, you could burn an extra 100 calories over the course of 24 sleeping hours, according to study results. That might not sound like much, but it adds up—in theory at least. See, re...

New research suggests that sleep is even more important than we thought~ Not getting enough sleep can make you groggy, but can it also make you fat? Researchers at the University of Chicago think it's a strong possibility. In a new study published in the  Annals of Internal Medicine , researchers determined that  four nights of sleep deprivation reduced insulin sensitivity in fat cells by a whopping 30 percent. And the less sensitive your cells are to insulin, the less your body produces the hunger-regulating hormone leptin. "This is one of the first studies to show that a cell outside of the brain—the fat cell—also needs sleep," says study author Matthew Brady, Ph.D., vice-chair of the Committee on Molecular Metabolism and Nutrition at the University of Chicago. Brady and a team of researchers put seven young, healthy subjects through two study conditions: First, they spent 8.5 hours in bed for four nights in a row (participants slept for roughly 8 hours each night, the ...

Ever lay in bed at night, only to find that you’re wide awake? You may count sheep, or toss and turn while your mind keeps churning away about your day, to-do list, and all the shut-eye you’re missing as each second ticks by. But there’s a more productive way to snuggle into bedtime and  sleep better : These 5 simple  yoga poses  will relax your body and mind so that you can slip into a peaceful and well-deserved slumber 1. Reclined Spinal Twist Begin lying on your back with both legs straight. Bend your left knee into your chest and give it a good squeeze with your arms as you lengthen your lower back. Keeping the knee bent, drop it over to the right and extend your left arm flat onto the ground in line with the shoulder. Place your right hand above your left knee and give gentle pressure as you keep the lower back lengthening. Try your best to drop the left shoulder completely to the ground. Hold for 8 breaths then come back to center and switch sides. 2. Reclined Big T...

The less you sleep you get the more ghrelin (an appetite-amped chemical) your body makes and the lower your output of leptin (a hormone that helps let your body know when you are full).  When you have these two body chemicals "malfunctioning" adding in your lack of sleep you have a recipe for overeating and bad food choices.  You tend to go for the fatty, salty, carb filled foods-so those doughnuts in the morning staff meeting are nearly impossible to pass over! Also, plenty of us get up with the chickens to get in that early morning workout, but if you aren't hitting the hay early enough the night before, your weight loss efforts just may be in vain.  A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that sleep deprived people that are doing a low calorie diets lost 55% less body fat than their well rested counterparts.  What these sleepy folks did lose, was lean muscle mass. So it is very important for SO many reasons to get enough sleep.  A lot ...