Sleep great to shed weight [tonight]
This question might be personal, but do you wake up to pee in the middle of the night?
And if you do, are you paying attention to the time when you wake up for a quick bathroom run before falling back asleep?
I would say that 90% of the people I’ve spoken to are in this late-night bathroom boat; waking up to pee usually between 1-3 am.
But here’s the thing: waking up to pee in the middle of the night is NOT normal, AND it can contribute to weight gain over time.
Waking up to pee in the wee hours (pun intended! LOL) of the night or morning is actually a huge clue about your health.
It can give you great insight about your blood sugar balance, detoxification system, and emotional state – all of which ultimately impact energy levels, ability to lose weight and feel like your best self.
However, we’ve been conditioned to think that using the bathroom or getting up in the middle of the night is normal; it’s just a part of getting older and drinking too many fluids before bed.
Personally, I can take down over 8 ounces of water before bed and sleep soundly through the night. And with age, I haven’t developed a need to pee in the middle of the night.
I’ve also seen many of my clients turn their late-night potty runs or wake-up-for-no-reason experiences into a thing of the past once they address the underlying issues triggering their body to do this.
Aside from waking up to pee or otherwise providing a clue about your health status, this disruptive habit also interferes with your body’s ability to fully recover at night. This can leave you feeling slow to get going in the morning, and more prone to cravings, weight gain, hormone imbalances, and other health issues down the road.
It’s time to retrain your body so you can sleep through the night, wake up feeling like your best self, and shed pounds overnight!
In this week’s video and blog, I’m going to bust through these middle-of-the-night wake-up myths and give you my top tips for solid sleep so you can wake up rested, and achieve your ideal health and weight!
To start, let’s talk about why waking in the middle of the night is such a big health deal breaker in the first place.
According to your body’s internal clock, known as your circadian rhythm, the most optimal sleep time frame to feel like your best self is 10 pm to 4 am.
This internal clock is ruled by the sun and the moon cycles.
When the sun rises in the morning, temperature and light increase, letting your body know it’s time to get up and get moving. Morning is when you should have the most energy, and it will slowly taper off throughout the day into the evening in alignment with the sun cycle and your internal clock.
When the sun sets in the evening, temperature and light decrease, signaling your body to prepare for sleep by dropping your energy levels, releasing the sleep hormone known as melatonin, and transitioning into the nervous system’s parasympathetic rest and digest mode.
In parasympathetic mode, your body sends all of its blood flow and resources inwards to organs that support digestion, detoxification, circulation, and restoration.
Based on this internal clock, your body does some massive repair work in the middle of the night while in peak parasympathetic mode from 10 pm to 4 am. If you’re not sleeping, the parasympathetic process is interrupted and this work can’t happen, leaving you feeling tired and unrested the next morning.
This is why if you go to sleep late or wake up in the middle of the night, you still feel tired no matter how much you sleep the next day or despite the number of sleep hours you get.
Low energy can then lead to cravings as your body searches for fuel to keep you going throughout the day. You find yourself craving quick energy fixes in the form of carbs, sugars, and caffeine that can disrupt your sleep even more.
And all of this negatively impacts your ability to lose weight from the foods you end up eating for energy to the hormone imbalances and detox backup a disrupted night of sleep creates.
So now that you know how important it is to sleep through the night in order to wake up rested and feeling your best, let’s address retraining your body so you can get the critical window of sleep you need.
Waking up in the middle of the night strongly correlates with 3 primary scenarios…
Scenario #1: Your Blood Sugar Drops
This is the most common one I see. When your blood sugar drops too low, your body releases the hormone cortisol to bring it back into balance.
You might know of cortisol as your stress hormone, which it is, among other things. Cortisol is also what spikes in the morning when the sun rises as part of your circadian rhythm to give you the energy to get up and get going.
When your blood sugar drops in the middle of the night, cortisol is released, giving you this same boost of energy. It’s like getting a shot of adrenaline, and what does everyone do instinctually when they wake up?…go to the bathroom!
Constant high outputs of cortisol like this also strongly correlate with weight gain around your midsection.
So balancing your blood sugar is the first thing you can do to promote sleeping through the night. Having balanced blood sugar also helps you to avoid cravings and lose weight.
Eating the right ratios of proteins, carbs, and fat at each meal will help you to balance your blood sugar and get better sleep.
When you’re eating the right ratio of protein, carbs, and fats per meal, you will:
- Be able to go 3-5 hours or more without feeling hungry or needing to snack
- Have energy for hours and feel recharged
- Think clearly, feel uplifted, and be more positive
Figuring out your food ratios is pretty simple. All you need to do is:
- Tune into your body 30 minutes to 2 hours after eating
- Notice how it’s responding to what you ate
- Adjust your food ratios until you get the perfect response!
To help you figure out what ratios are right for your body to get a good night’s sleep, click here to get my Food & Body Language Log.
Scenario #2: Look at Your Liver
Balancing blood sugar usually solves about 90% of the sleep disruption issues I see, but when it doesn’t, it’s time to look at your liver.
Based on your internal clock, your liver and other detoxification organs do their deepest detox work from about 1 to 3 am.
If you find yourself waking up during this time, it could indicate a toxic build-up or detox traffic jam. Your liver and detox organs could be burdened by too many toxins or struggling to eliminate them. This can lead to a build-up of estrogen and toxins in the body that can also contribute to weight gain.
In this scenario, incorporating more detoxifying foods such as beets, grapefruit, lemon, cilantro, and dandelion while avoiding processed and non-organic can positively impact your detox body’s detox system.
A daily natural liver support supplement containing ingredients such as tudca, NAC, milk thistle, dandelion, artichoke leaf, and burdock root can be extremely beneficial given the number of toxins our body is bombarded with daily.
Pairing this with balancing your blood sugar should do the trick and give you the best night’s sleep ever!
(SIDE NOTE: Scenarios 1 & 2 also highly correlate with root causes of PCOS as I’ll be discussing in more detail during the Transforming PCOS Summit starting Nov. 18th)
Scenario #3: Emotional Influences
If you’ve tried loving your liver more and balancing your blood sugar but still wake up in the middle of the night, it’s time to explore emotional influences.
According to Chinese Medicine, each organ of the body is associated with a certain emotion, and as we just discussed in scenario #2, organs do deep work during a certain time of the night based on your internal clock.
We can put these two clues together to uncover the emotional influences waking you up at night.
For example, waking up between 1 and 3 am is associated with the detox organs (i.e. liver and gallbladder); the emotions connected to these can be grief, anger, fear, and depression.
Journaling, meditating, or seeking counseling around these emotions can quickly put your sleep issues to rest. Sometimes we don’t suspect we’re dealing with these emotions, but we are. Grief, for example, isn’t always related to the loss of a loved one. It could be related to a recent job change, as we grieve leaving behind the old ways even with excitement for what is to come.
The bottom line, waking up in the middle of the night is NOT normal, and sleeping through the night consistently is part of the formula for feeling like your best self.
I’ve yet to see a client who can’t sleep through the night when we address these three scenarios, and as I said, most of the time we knock it out with just one.
I’d love to know what you found most helpful about the information I’ve shared.
Comment below with your biggest aha, insight, or takeaway!
