Long over are your nights of midnight snacking and poor sleep on a bad mattress. With these helpful tips, you can stop weight gain in its tracks and start losing that extra fat you’ve been wanting to get rid of.
- Why Do You Lose Weight When You Sleep?
- How Does Cool Air Help You Lose Weight While Sleeping?
- Benefits of Sleeping in a Cool Bedroom
- Additional Benefits of Sleeping in a Cool Bedroom
- How to Improve Sleep Hygiene to Promote Weight Loss
- Lose Weight, Gain Sleep
Why Do You Lose Weight When You Sleep?
If you’ve ever woken up, stepped on the scale, and noticed you may have lost a pound or two, you may be wondering if your scale is broken. Is it possible to lose weight while you sleep? In fact, yes — you can lose weight while sleeping.
Your body is comprised of about 60% water, and when you sleep, you aren’t replenishing your H2O levels. From sweating to breathing and going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, your body expels water throughout the night, which helps lower your weight. Water weight is one of the main reasons why you lose weight when you sleep. However, water isn’t the only source of weight loss during sleep.
In addition to water weight, you lose weight when sleeping through carbon loss. While you sleep, your body breaks down carbohydrates and fat to produce energy while you sleep to keep your body functioning. When you breathe, more carbon dioxide is leaving your body than you are inhaling. Even though a single carbon molecule barely weighs a fraction of a gram, you exhale billions of trillions of carbon molecules with each breath, which adds up and lowers your body weight.
However, between water weight and carbon loss, water weight is the main contributor to weight loss during sleep.
How Does Cool Air Help You Lose Weight While Sleeping?
Mothers have insisted since time began that fresh air is always good, and it turns out that they have a point. According to the Chicago School of Medicine, fresh air definitely has health properties, including losing weight. Simply opening a window at night can increase humidity in your bedroom, which helps prevent dehydration.
Additionally, the best temperature for sleep is around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, so setting the air conditioner or creating a cross breeze to achieve this temperature can help you fall asleep and stay asleep. But the cooler temperatures offer another benefit that helps you burn fat while sleeping.
Benefits of Sleeping in a Cool Bedroom
One benefit of sleeping with a window open that Mom probably didn’t think about: it can help you lose weight. According to a research scientist at Oxford University, colder temperatures stimulate the metabolism, as it takes energy to stay warm. Using up calories, whether by exercising or making your body keep itself warm, helps with weight loss.
This is why a copper mattress will help you sleep cooler, which in turn, helps regulate a cool sleeping environment. But there is more to this sleeping theory than burning calories to get rid of fat. It turns out that people have two kinds of fat: brown and white. Brown fat is the good stuff: it burns whenever it’s necessary to keep warm. The problem is that your body doesn’t store very much of it. White fat is the stuff we’re all sadly familiar with: it simply gets stored in the body, giving us bellies or thunder thighs.
But if you sleep with a window open, the cold air quickly depletes your body’s brown fat. In order to keep you warm, the body converts extra white to brown fat. The end result leads to you burning fat while sleeping, and thus weight loss.
Another great way to help kickstart your journey to weight loss while you sleep is by limiting your exposure to blue light right before bed to help regulate your circadian rhythm. Blue light suppresses melatonin production, which throws your circadian rhythm out of sync. It mimics light from the sun, causing our brains to think it’s daytime.
Consequently, irregular circadian rhythms trick our bodies into holding onto fat that would otherwise be metabolized during sleep. One way to combat the effects of blue light is to limit your exposure to TV, cell phone, and computer screens for a few hours leading up to bedtime. Once you keep your blue light exposure to a minimum and crack open your windows, you’re ready for a great night’s sleep for weight loss.
Additional Benefits of Sleeping in a Cool Bedroom
The general rule is that if it’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true. But burning fat while sleeping in a cold room seems to be the real deal.
- Professor Grossman, who conducted the Oxford study, believes that chilly air in the bedroom that lowers the temperature even a few degrees might even help those who have type-2 diabetes.
- The Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands conducted a study that concluded that keeping the thermostat at around 60 degrees for a few hours a day will help keep weight down.
According to a scholar at the National Sleep Foundation, there are several other benefits of fresh air and a cool bedroom:
- Fresh air has a cooling effect, which is key to getting a good night’s sleep;
- People associate fresh air with relaxation, and thus it can help make folks sleepy; and
- A drop in temperature tells the body that the day is done and it’s time for bed.
How to Improve Sleep Hygiene to Promote Weight Loss
With so many benefits of sleeping in a cool room, you may be wondering if there are additional ways to improve your sleep hygiene to promote weight loss. While sleeping in a cool room is a great way to improve your sleep, there are additional tips you can implement into your sleep routine to get better sleep, and ultimately lose more weight:
- Comfortable bedding: Tossing and turning from scratchy sheets and hot comforters can disrupt your sleep and impact weight loss. Creating a comfortable sleeping environment can be done with cooling bedding sets.
- Temperature: We know that sleeping in a cool bedroom promotes sleep and weight loss, but how can you achieve this? Some tips to beat the heat include sleeping with a fan, freezing your pillowcases, staying hydrated, and investing in cooling bedding.
- Exercise: Exercising not only helps your body stay healthy, but it can also improve your sleep and help you lose weight. However, make sure you’re not exercising before bed, as the adrenaline can cause you to stay awake.
These are just some of the ways you can improve your sleep hygiene to get better sleep and promote weight loss.
Lose Weight, Gain Sleep
Cool air is particularly helpful for people suffering from insomnia and lets them get a rare good night’s sleep. By lowering the temperature in the brain, the frontal cortex slows down. That’s the part of the brain that controls, among other things, the conscience, emotions, and memories — in short, all of the things that can easily keep one up at night.
Cool the frontal cortex, and it’s a lot easier to chill out, leading to a full night of good restorative sleep. Pair a cool sleeping environment with Layla’s weighted blanket and you’ve got a recipe that will kick insomnia out your open window.
At Layla Sleep, we’ve known about the connection between feeling cool and a good night’s sleep for a while now. That’s why we designed copper infused mattresses in a box!.
When you settle down on one of our beds, the copper cells inside our comfy mattresses compress and pull away body heat. Now it turns out that if you combine the special properties of our mattress with fresh air, you may have an even greater chance for a deep (and maybe even slimming) night’s sleep.
So if you’d rather lose weight while sleeping than dieting, throw your window open wide in the dead of winter or crank up your air conditioner in the summer when you go to bed.
