Sleep: More Important Than Food!?

Yeah, no joke. I spent all that time on food when, all this time, sleep was more important.

Actually, sleep is more important than food from a survival perspective, but it’s relatively less complicated and you probably face fewer challenges than in eating right, so that explains the emphasis given nutrition. My nutrition filibusters are mostly done. Hopefully you’ve forgiven me for past posts’ lengthiness, but I felt I had to cover the basics, and now we can move on to more nutrition topics. Hopefully you’re working on nutrition changes already or working on a plan for the new year. I’m happy to help get you on your way, so feel free to email me. We can do a food log analysis, and go from there. I encourage you to review the posts’ take-home messages:

1. nutrition: why care
2. for longevity/performance, eat Rx: paleo food, take fish oil, source intelligently…
3. understand the zone
4. eat post-workout within 1/2 hr to make the most of your gains

And now I’m going to add one that will be much less challenging I hope…

5. get quality sleep and a lot of it (7-10 hours)

Two very interesting things happened this holiday to me around sleep. The first was an unexpected sleep hygiene lesson I got from a doctor: I took my little sister who was having sleep issues in to see the doctor and realized that we both had pretty bad sleep hygiene. She: too much in-bed Facebooking, me: too much late night reading. The second was a long overdue new bed as one of my Christmas presents through which I learned how to buy a good bed (I’ll share some links at the end in case you’re in the market).

As tempting as it is to break out the charts and graphs on REM cycles and circadian rhythm for sleep, I’d probably put you to sleep. Before I get to sleep hygiene, here are some why-you-should’s and if-you-don’ts:

Why you should…

• Recovery: Sleep is perhaps the biggest part of recovery. Recovery is the final piece of the fitness cycle — the other two being exercise and nutrition. During quality sleep, your body does the majority of its muscle-building, tissue repairing, and ‘resetting’ of your nervous system; during quality sleep time, important hormones and growth factors act to aid these processes and use fat as energy for some of this work.
• Systems: Sleep is needed to restore not only muscle and other tissues, but especially the brain: sleep helps consolidate and commit information to memory and helps restore the nervous system. Sleep helps maintain a healthy immune system.
• Prevention: Sleep reduces stress, inflammation, may prevent cancer, helps memory, keeps all your systems healthy, can help you lose fat, reduce your risk for depression, cancer, and other diseases, and plenty more.

If you don’t…

• Lack of sleep minimizes recovery (and anabolic activity — muscle rebuilding) and negatively impacts performance.
• Lack of sleep results an increase in the presence of active stress hormones which when present consistently have also been associated with plenty of diseases.
• Chronic sleep loss can significantly impact the capacity of metabolic functions, such as regulating hormone secretion, particularly those that relate to the processing and storing of carbohydrate, as well as significant changes in glucose tolerance and endocrine function (tending toward pre-type-2 diabetes).
• Shift work was recently deemed a probable carcinogen (direct link to cancer risk)
• An increase in these stress hormones is also associated with fat gain for some, especially mid-section fat.

Sleep hygiene…

Sleep hygiene means habits that ensure your sleep is quality and that you actually get enough of it. Here were the doctors orders:

Establish Patterns:

• Go to sleep at the same time every night. Set the mood 1-2 hours before you get into bed by lowering the lights and music/TV, turning off electronics, showering, brushing teeth at this time, adjusting temperature, etc. If you want to change your sleep patterns, do so in small increments of time.
• Don’t hit the snooze button (I laughed out loud at this one). Apparently falling back asleep several times is a recipe for exhaustion. You’re supposed to get out of bed and open a window.
• Save the bed for sleeping (unless you had plans — wink wink <–whatever you want that to mean — do what works for you). This means, don’t stay up in bed watching TV, phone, reading, or on the computer. Keeping the bed for sleeping puts your brain in the habit of wanting to sleep once you’re in bed.
• Get the same amount each night: between 7 and 10 hours — 8 is optimal for most people.

Optimize your environment:

• Coolness: temperatures allow your circadian rhythm to stay on track and allow your body to burn fat for fuel during sleep
• Darkness: he better to allow the most melatonin release which allows a deeper
• Quiet: if there are loud noises like banging, sirens, etc, get a white/ambient noise maker.
• If you can’t fall asleep get up and do something boring, un-stimulating.
• Avoid doing things that make sleep harder and less quality: working out before bed, lights in the room, naps in the day longer than 2 hours, caffeine/alcohol 4+ hours before sleep time
• A comfy bed that provides support + pillow to provide enough neck support, especially if you sleep on your side.

Sleep is actually more important than food if you rank things by life-or-death necessity. I enjoyed Robb Wolf’s bit on sleep here. And here’s a good one from OPT.

From CF-Asia's 100 Inverted Burpees for time

Make sleep a top priority for a couple/few weeks, note in your WOD journal what you got the night before and take note of the difference in how you felt and performed.

Beddy-bye

If you’re thrifty like me and thought that buying a moderately priced Ikea bed for two people to sleep in was a good idea and you figured out the hard way that you were so very wrong, or if your bed causes you any sleeping problems, then I strongly encourage you to just get a new bed. A good bed has prorated warranties, so a very good one (~$700) comes out to about $0.20/day if your bed lives as long as the warranty (~10 yrs). As for buying advice, you can’t generalize on mattresses — it’s truly confounding. You can’t comparison shop because every department store has unique lines and products (done on purpose to confuse you), and you’re supposed to test them out for 15 minutes at least. Supposedly the $400-$700 range will get you a decent mattress from the top brand names.

The frustration of the process has caused me probably more avoided and missed sleep that I’d like to admit. If you’re in the market, here are some articles I found useful. Good luck!

From the Better Sleep Council on Mattress Shopping
Overview from Consumer Reports
Slate’s take on the confounding mattress market

Turkey/Beef Marinara

Phone pic (sorry!): served in an acorn squash bowl with broccoli & avo

Your recipe for the week is Paleo Turkey/Beef Marinara. This is for lazy nights — extremely easy, serve in a squash bowl (half, seed, bake @ 400F for 35-45min) with a side of red cabbage slaw or steamed dark greens.

Serves 4:
2T oil (coconut/grapeseed)
1 lg yellow onion – diced
1 green bell pepper – diced
2 green zucchini – diced
4 lg leaves kale – diced finely
8 cloves garlic
2t each: oregano, basil, parsley, rosemary
1/2t each: salt, pepper, cayenne
1.25-1.5 lbs ground turkey meat or lean grass fed ground beef
1/4c red wine or 3T red wine vinegar (optional)
1/2-whole jar marinara — Trader Joe’s has a good no sugar added one (check ingredients)

On medium heat in a very large pan/pot, sautee the first 4 veggies (other veggies work, just add more onion + garlic if you add more other veggies) until onions. Add the meat, sautee and chop into chunks w/spatula for 3-5 min, add garlic + spices and continue to turn until meat is almost cooked through (~5 min), add wine, let it steam off for 1-2 mins, then add marinara for 1-2min. Enjoy!

WOD 12.30.2009

Pendlay Row 5-5-5-5 — video
Video courtesy of Catalyst Athletics

2K Row – Damper setting of 5 – Advanced damper 10
Goals:
Men sub 7:00
Women sub 8:45

Optional Strength:
Snatch 90% 3-3
Clean & jerk 90% 2-2
Back squat 90% 2-2