Wellness – Sleep

Try not to eat anything after your evening meal. At least not two hours before bed. As you sleep and you go through the fasting process because you aren’t eating for 8+ hours, your liver is resetting your metabolism and resetting your blood sugar and insulin levels which is essential for weight management.

If we don’t get enough sleep on a regular basis, especially if we drink caffeine, or eat something of a carbohydrate or sugary nature, just before bed, it puts the body under stress and that resetting of the blood sugar levels can’t happen as efficiently. The result, weight gain.

It is also essential to reduce the amount of caffeine consumption before bed too, as it might just keep you awake for half the night, then you could get into the nasty cycle of needing caffeine to stay awake at work the next day, so more caffeine, and it goes on. Eventually your adrenal glands would have had enough with the constant over simulation, and you would experience adrenal failure, when your adrenals can not longer cope and you will feel tired all the time unless you are hyped up on caffeine.

They reckon it takes 12 hours after drinking a cup of coffee or similar for your body to be completely free of caffeine, so you can imagine what sort of issues you are potentially causing by having caffeine too close to bed time, and too many times during the day. In saying that, some people can have caffeine late at night and many times during the day and still go straight to sleep and sleep all night. There have been some interesting theories about that stating that your blood type might have something to do with it. I do know that a couple of my friends who have Type A blood types seem to be able to have caffeine whenever and sleep soundly, but for me and others I know who have O Positive blood types, we seem to suffer with a sleepless night if we have caffeine too late at night.

If you do experience adrenal failure, you will need to cut back or cut out caffeine completely for a while and increase the amount of protein you eat to reset your adrenals. The best way to start a day with full energy is with protein, scrambled eggs or similar. I usually don’t have time for a cooked breakfast every morning, so I add a scoop of a protein shake onto my gluten free cereal. But if you have adrenal failure, eating protein first thing every morning and making sure each meal has plenty of protein for a good couple of weeks should help your adrenal glands reset and recover again. And eventually once you feel your energy levels have come back, you might be able to go back to your favourite cereal or the occasional coffee.