How Well You Sleep Can Affect Your Weight.

Nikken is heavily promoting the magnetic sleep systems this month to the distributors. Yesterday I received an email from them and this is what it said.

Did you know?
Losing weight appears to be the number one resolution each new year. Unfortunately, nearly 90 percent of these resolutions meet with either little or no success. Most people do not know that there may be a very simple reason why: They don’t sleep well.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published studies suggesting that a lack of sleep may increase hunger and affect the body’s metabolism, which may make it more difficult to maintain or lose weight. When you obtain restful sleep, your body can better regulate the chemicals that control hunger and appetite.
Disruption of circadian clocks has ramifications for metabolism, brain, and behavior.

Anytime you hear that “there are studies” it’s a good idea to find some that back up the claim. So I went to the PubMed website and did a quick search. Here are three studies of the many that I found.

The first one is titled Role of Sleep and Sleep Loss in Hormonal Release and Metabolism. You can click the link to read the abstract yourself. It says that chronic partial sleep loss may increase the risk of weight gain and obesity, decreased glucose tolerance, decreased insulin sensitivity, and increased hunger and appetite. I’m no doctor, but decreased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity sounds like a description of diabetes to me.

Lack of sleep is a double whammy as far as weight gain. First sleep loss reduces your ability to process glucose completely, so it gets stored somewhere for later, which equals weight gain. You also get to have increased hunger and appetite, which we all know leads to weight gain.

The second study that interested me is Disruption of circadian clocks has ramifications for metabolism, brain, and behavior. The “circadian clock” is responsible for keeping our activity and sleep cycles matched up with the light and dark cycles and this study set out to find out how disrupting that normal cycle would affect some mice. As with the previous study, messing with their normal patters resulted in weight gain. It also showed “decreases in cognitive flexibility and changes in emotionality.” In other words, they couldn’t deal with problems and they got grumpy, sound familiar?

Finally there is Sleep disturbances and inflammatory bowel disease: a potential trigger for disease flare? This one sounds like Chron’s Disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but as I said before, I’m not a doctor. It says that changes in the circadian rhythm have been linked to the development of colitis, which is inflammation of the colon (or the large intestine as it was called in grade school). This abstract is a call for more research in this area. For our purposes here, it shows another link between digestion and how well we sleep.

How to Get Better Sleep

The best night’s sleep I have ever had has been on my Nikken sleep system, and I have been sleeping on it for almost 5 years now. There are benefits to having just the magnetic mattress topper, just the magnetic comforter, or even just the magnetic pillow. When you put it all together though it becomes amazing. It all works together to help you relax into deep sleep where those natural processes, proper digestion in this case, can take place as they should.

Disclaimer: I am a massage therapist and Nikken distributor. I am not a doctor and Nikken’s products are not medical devices. I don’t make any claim that Nikken’s sleep system will help you with any medical condition that you may have. My only claim is that my family has slept very well on our’s and I believe you will too.

Wayne Woodworth