How sugar affects your sleep
Russell Clark
Posted: October 04, 2012
Sleep is one of the single most important factors in both mental and physical recovery and could be the key to unlocking and improving performance.
How you sleep impacts hugely on your appetite and the foods you choose. After a good nights sleep your body is happy with and craves clean and lean food : Good quality protein, dark green vegetables, oily fish, nuts, seeds, oils and berries. After a night of poor, broken or not enough sleep, your body becomes hungrier and craves sugar, fat and caffeine. Why? Because these quickly (albeit briefly) prop up your energy levels. This is why you will crave McDonalds breakfast or a full English fry up when you have a hangover...
Most of us admittedly struggle to achieve the optimal amount of quality sleep. (8 hours minimum) This could be attributed to multiple reasons however one of the biggest sleep vampires of all is.... Sugar.
We know we will never be clean and lean if we continue to eat sugar, it is a terrible fattening toxin that makes you fat and wrinkly. But it also makes you sleep deprived because as we’ve seen, it makes your blood-sugar levels rise too rapidly. It also causes you to wake up hungry for more sugar and other fattening foods. When your tired - for whatever reason - the temptation is to ’eat yourself awake’ and sugar nearly always is the first thing you reach for. However if you want a decent nights sleep, you need to stick to clean lean sleep inducing foods.
Here are some Take home tips
Increase: + Nuts + Fish + Eggs
Decrease / Avoid: + White refined sugar + Alcohol (basically all sugar) + White non organic pasta, bread and rice + Cakes, sweets, biscuits, treats.. + Low fat foods like diet yoghurt, processed cereals and energy drinks + Processed foods + Anything ending that contains an ingredient ending in ’ose’ (sucrose, glucose, maltose, lactose, dextrose and fructose) these are all basically the same word for sugar
For more information or help to improve your diet and performance contact Rusty @ GB Farringdon - russellc@gymbox.co.uk
Follow on twitter : @motiv8rusty
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