Sleep Optimization Strategies To Reduce Inflammation And Burn Fat

Fat Burning and Insulin at Night 0:00

So what's the best time to burn fat? Well, would you believe it's actually at night while we're sleeping? And we all want to be burning fat while we sleep. However, there are many individuals that are not able to, and that's because they have higher levels of insulin. You see, insulin is a key hormone that your pancreas produces to get sugar out of the bloodstream and put it into the cells, muscle cells as well as the fat cells. And a lot of people, because of how they eat and how they live, they have insulin resistance and they have higher levels of insulin.

And if your insulin is elevated at night, you were going to store fat and not burn fat. So we really need to get insulin down. In fact, there's like a threshold kind of a line that if insulin is above that line, you're storing fat. If it drops below that line, you're burning fat. So from a nutrition perspective, there are certain things we do in order to get insulin down. Things like a lower carbohydrate diet, high in protein that will help stabilize your blood sugar and your insulin levels. Also, things like intermittent fasting can be really helpful.

Exercise can be really helpful, but sleep is really just as critical. And here are five key things we want to do to help set us up for the best night's sleep so we can really optimize our fat burning.

Food Timing for Better Fat Loss 1:24

So the first thing is food timing. And so we talked a little bit about what we need to eat. I talked about a lower carbohydrate diet. Get rid of the ultra processed foods in the high carbohydrate foods and instead really try to prioritize protein and healthy fats. But also timing our meals is really critical. We know that when at night, when when there's no sun in the sky, our body's producing more melatonin and we are more insulin resistant, meaning that our body's not going to respond to insulin as well.

Our cells are not going to open their door. Insulin is kind of like a key opening the cellular door. They're not going to be as responsive. Therefore, our body's going to produce more insulin when we eat food at night. So the best thing we can do from a food timing perspective is eat during the day. During the day we have more insulin sensitivity. Therefore we're going to be able to burn fat more effectively. We're going to be able to utilize get insulin down right and not utilize quite as much insulin.

And therefore at night we're going to have lower levels of insulin so we can burn fat. So food timing is key. Eat during the daylight hours. Eat a lower carbohydrate diet. High in protein high in healthy fats. Make sure you got fiber polyphenols from colorful fruits and vegetables in there. If you do that, you're getting the the food timing down. One of the worst things you can do for fat burning is eat a big meal late at night. When you eat a big meal late at night, your digestive juices are not working as well.

You're not producing as much stomach acid, bile, pancreatic enzymes. Food will get in your gut. It will kind of sit there, rot and petrify, create more endotoxins, drive up inflammation in your body. You're not going to be able to move the carbohydrates and going your body's going to produce insulin, but it's not going to be able to move the carbohydrates into the cells as effectively. So you have higher insulin. So you're storing fat and promoting inflammation. So eat during the day. That's food timing.

Second thing is really just as important light exposure timing. So light just like food, food is information for the cells of our body. Light is as well. So certain types of light we want to avoid at night, certain types of light we want to get during the day. And the way that this works is that early in the day we want to get a lot of bright light. So going out, watching the sunrise, going out and getting bright light around the middle of the day, that actually helps set our circadian rhythm. And it tells our brain, okay, it's day time right now.

Therefore we want to make sure we've got, different excitatory neurotransmitters, things like dopamine, norepinephrine, cortisol all elevated to some degree and actually gives us more energy, more wakefulness.

Light Exposure and Circadian Rhythm 4:07

It helps us with fat burning during the day, helps us with, really just having great energy and mental clarity throughout the day. But then as we get in the evening and we get near sunset, we want to make sure that we get rid of all of that bright, what we call blue light. Get rid of that. In fact, as we get near sunset, you should dim all the lights, turn off lights or dim lights in your house. The only kind of light that you might want to have a little bit of would be like an orange, type of light almost mimicking a fire.

Our ancestors, if they were exposed to any kind of light in the evening or at night, it was fire was sunset, which is more red light as well as fire, and that has less of a melatonin reducing effect. When we're exposed to bright lights at night, we block our melatonin production. And melatonin is this critical critical hormone that helps with sleep, helps with setting our circadian rhythm. So we get really good deep sleep, deep fat burning sleep at night. But also it actually acts as a really powerful antioxidant that gets into our mitochondria, goes through both membranes of our mitochondria, cleans out oxidative stress, and the healthier our mitochondria are, the better we're going to be at fat burning.

So having optimal levels of melatonin at night helps you burn fat all throughout the day as well as at night. So making sure that you're not being exposed to bright lights at night helps you burn fat more effectively. So dim all your lights. You might have a little bit of lighting on in your house, and then you can wear something like this. If you're going to be on electronics, you're going to be watching TV on your computer. Something like that. These are called blue light blocking glasses. So they make everything look orange.

And that actually blocks out the bright lights. So if you are on your device, which isn't I don't I don't recommend that. But you know, all of us do that at some degree in the evenings. Make sure you get those blue light blocking glasses on. That's going to help reduce any sort of melatonin inhibition and set you up for a really good night's sleep. And then in your bedroom, make sure that you've got it as dark as possible. You can wear things like a sleep mask. We'll talk more about that when we get down to here.

Sleep hygiene, but light exposure, timing key bright light during the day. No bright light at night. As darkness. As much darkness as possible. In fact, you know, some researchers say in our society we have a darkness deficiency. I mean, think about it like a nutrient, like being vitamin D deficient. We know that affects our immune system, that affects our ability to burn fat, it affects our brain function and development. Well, having a deficiency in darkness as well, we'll have a lot of a lot of problems for our body will throw off our circadian rhythm, our ability to burn fat.

So our metabolic health, our immune health, our cognitive health. So getting that darkness is critical. Number three here is exercise timing. So we want to make sure we're exercising and we're moving our body. But really as little as possible in the once it's dark once

Exercise Timing and Post-Dinner Walks 7:11

it's dark we don't want to be doing really any type of exercise. If we do any sort of exercise, it should be very, very light, maybe a little bit of stretching, maybe a little bit of walking, but as light as possible. We don't want to activate our sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight part of our nervous system. We want to do that during the daytime, early in the day, maybe in the morning or around midday. Great time to get a lot of good exercise, get strength training in, perhaps, you know, go for a run, whatever type of exercise you really enjoy and that you feel like you're getting good results with getting your heart rate up to a certain amount, challenging your body, getting into a state of oxygen debt where you've got to breathe deeply right, and kind of catch up on oxygen after you, after you do an exercise bout that's actually really healthy helps set your circadian rhythm if you're doing that during the day and helps stimulate more fat burning at night.

So I recommend doing strength training at least 3 to 5 days a week, perhaps doing a little bit of cardiovascular training, maybe high intensity interval training. If you want to, you can kind of throw that in there. But that's really key. And that will actually set your circadian rhythm, help improve your insulin sensitivity and help you get deeper, more restorative sleep at night. And better fat burning while you're sleeping at night. Now, one thing this is a really good quick tip is after you eat your evening meal.

So after you eat dinner, go and take a walk. That right there, you want some sort of low intensity movement right after your dinner? Ideally again eating your dinner during the daylight hours so before it gets dark ideally, and then going out and taking a walk. The walk, if it's if the sun is still out, you can do a fast paced walk. You can do some sort of a, you know, a little bit higher intensity walk if you want to. After the sun has gone down, make sure it's very low intensity. Right. So you're not trying to get your heart rate up.

You're doing a lower intensity walk. And in general you don't want to workout at a real high intensity after dinner after your eating, because that will take energy away from digestion and bring the blood flow out to your skeletal muscles. Not ideal. After you eat, you really want as much of the energy going into your digestive system as possible, and light walking will really help with that. So take a walk after dinner that will help your body, improve its insulin sensitivity. Help pull sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells, pull nutrients out of the bloodstream and into the cells.

And it will also help set your circadian rhythms. So very important there sleep hygiene. So making sure that your room is as dark as possible, making sure it's cool, a cooler environment you're going to sleep better so you can have an overhead fan.

Sleep Hygiene for Deeper Recovery 9:54

You might turn on the air conditioning. You might use something like an cooler or a bed jet, which actually helps to make the actual bed like the sheet your on cooler air. And a lot of people get more deep, restorative sleep doing that. I think it's a really great approach. And then I always recommend a sleep mask at night. A lot of people are like, well, my room is really dark, but I find that people that are using a sleep mask, this putting something like this on over their eyes, get deeper, more restorative sleep.

It blocks out any sort of ambient light that might get in and helps optimize melatonin release for better fat burning and better immune health. So wearing a sleep mask can be extremely helpful here. So that's your sleep hygiene. And then the last thing is nasal breathing. A lot of people are mouth breathers. So throughout the day they're getting most of their oxygen in by breathing through their mouth. We really shouldn't be doing that. The only time we should be breathing through our mouth is when we're out of breath.

Like if we're exercising in a really high intensity or, you know, for a firm possibly in our, you know, conversation and intense conversation, or if I'm speaking like I am right now, we might be getting some, some, you know, catching up with, with mouth breathing. But at night while we're sleeping or really at any time when we're at rest, we should be breathing through our nose and particularly at night while we're sleeping. It's actually better for your oral health. People that are mouth breathers have higher risk of gingivitis.

Of tooth decay, cavities, things like that. So it's much better for your overall oral health. And nasal breathing helps stimulate nitric oxide release, which dilates blood vessels up into your brain so you get better, restorative function in your your brain. So it's actually better for your brain at, moving its lymphatic system in and pulling waste out of your brain and allowing your brain to really recover from, you know, from from sleep the night before

Nasal Breathing and Mouth Taping 11:48

and it really helps to activate fat burning as well, because as part of our parasympathetic or rest and relax part of our nervous system, which is associated with fat burning as opposed to our fight or flight nervous system, we don't want that activated at night while we're sleeping. If we're mouth breathing, we're getting more sympathetic fight or flight activation. So nasal breathing and one way to train your system to breathe at night is actually just put it's called mouth taping. It's put a little bit of tape over your mouth, which might sound intimidating.

And this is really how I trained my brain to activate more nasal breathing was, I just said mouth taping for about a month where I put tape over my mouth at night and it forced my brain to, reprogram itself to breathe through my nose. And so I breathe through my nose. I got the nasal breathing benefits after about a month or so. I had this, in a sense, this program down and, that had the muscle memory down in my brain to where now I'm always nasal breathing at night while I'm sleeping, which again helps with deeper, more sort of sleep and helps with fat burning.

So those are five key tips, to make sure that you are optimizing your ability to burn fat at night while you're sleeping. Hopefully you guys got a lot out of this video, and I'll see you on a future video training blast.