5 Ways to Boost Fat Burning While You Sleep

Sleep plays an important role in managing your weight. Lack of adequate sleep enhances your brain’s reward centers which results in poor decision-making especially when I t comes to food and exercise. Furthermore, it increases hormones that trigger hunger and fat storage while decreasing satiety hormones. This results in fat gain over time.

Apart from this, your body also continues to burn calories and fat even while you’re at rest. 

 The exact number of calories burned sleeping depends on a complex interplay between sleep, diet, exercise, and other variables. But there are things you can do during your waking hours to help your body burn more calories while you rest.

Today, we’ll be talking about five ways you can boost your body’s fat-burning capacity while you sleep. Let’s get started!

Drink a Protein Shake Before Bed

Drink a shake with about 30 grams of protein before heading to bed. Research has proven that it helps increase the number of calories the body burns while resting. Protein also aids in muscle repair, and the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn at rest.

Eat Smaller Meals at Night

Avoid eating large meals in the night and abstain from doing so just before sleeping. During deep sleep, our brain emits a growth hormone. If you eat late at night, the growth hormone stores the food in your system as fat instead of fuel.

Avoid Alcohol

Drinking alcohol close to bedtime will make your body metabolize the alcohol during your sleep, keeping you from achieving a state of REM, which is when the body burns the most calories. A glass of wine with dinner is fine, but remember to stop drinking alcohol three hours before you go to bed.

Set Your Bedtime

We all acknowledge that getting an optimal amount of sleep is paramount to our health, and yet busy schedules, movies, and cellphones get in the way of getting sound sleep. Committing to a healthy number of snoozing hours per night (7-8 hours) helps the body to burn more fat. An American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study found that well-rested people burned 20% more calories after eating than those who got less, improper sleep.

Shutdown All Electronics

Research conducted at Harvard University found that short-wavelength blue light emitted by tablets and smartphones prohibit the body’s production of the sleep-aiding hormone, melatonin. Another study conducted by Singapore based researchers found that long hours of television viewing caused higher levels of triglycerides (associated with diabetes) and lower levels of adiponectin (a protein that regulates glucose levels and fatty acid breakdown) in the body.