Livestrong has a good article about sleep, and the problems of not getting enough sleep. Type 2 diabetics should take heed of the following points:
- If you sleep more, you eat less, because you can’t eat while you’re asleep.
- If you sleep less, you develop cravings for junk food!
- If you sleep less, you may gain or maintain weight.
- If you don’t get enough sleep, your blood pressure stays high, longer, and becomes chronic hypertension.
I’ve joked about this before: one of the ways to boost your diet and weight loss efforts is not to exercise, but to sleep in. Sleep in, and don’t eat.
This is shown by a paper by Brown and Meerman that measured how much CO2 (carbon dioxide) is exhaled, and H20 (water) is excreted daily.
Most of our weight loss comes from breathing.
While exercise increases your fat burning by 7x, you can’t exercise all the time. You’ll hurt yourself.
The solution is to eat less. One way to eat less is to sleep more.
Why Do We Have a Hard Time Believing in the Effectiveness of Laziness?
The Protestant ethic!
Back in the early 1900s, sociologist Max Weber wrote a book that attributed the success of western capitalism to “the Protestant ethic”, that work reaps rewards, and is a sign of grace.
So we associate salvation with work, and work with salvation. Laziness, we associate with damnation, and damnation, we associate with laziness.
This fact: breathing is our main form of weight loss, and eating is our main form of weight gain, contradicts the “work ethic”.
We need to let go of these ideas.
To lose weight, sit, and breathe. Do not eat.
I know, this sounds “mystical”, but it’s facts.
When I lost weight, I did it by reducing calories down to around 1300 a day, and didn’t exercise.
Despite this experience, I still find myself thinking: “I need to walk more and exercise to lose this weight.”
I’m still believing the Protestant ethic, even when my experience disproved it!
