The Educated Eater Canada

By: Kimberley Record, Health Coach, RHN – Campbell River, BC

Have you ever noticed that after a good night’s sleep, it’s much easier to make healthier choices – food and otherwise – throughout the day?

When sleep-deprived, you are much more prone to reaching for health-sabotaging, sugary, and energy (calorie) dense foods – and more often! Why? There is actually a scientific reason for this: the hormones that control your hunger (grehlin) and fullness (leptin) go completely out of whack when you aren’t getting sufficient sleep. Grehlin increases, and leptin decreases – not exactly a great combination when trying to improve your eating habits.

So in fact, when you’re looking to make healthy changes to your diet, one of the first (and less obvious) areas to look at is your sleep hygiene.

Are you currently getting 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night? If you’ve answered no, then your attempts to improve your health and diet may be much less effective. To ensure you optimize your efforts by improving your sleep, follow this link for some simple tips:

http://sleepfoundation.org/ask-the-expert/sleep-hygiene

Educated Eater Challenge:

Try going to bed before 10pm for three nights in a row and see how different you feel by the third day. Share your experience here!