 Hey, everybody. Dr. O here. Welcome back to the Finding Your Fat Loss Sweet Spot series. We're on to 0.5 here, which is managing sleep and stress. We know that what we eat and how much we move are going to play a huge role in preserving muscle while we try to lose fat, but you may be surprised to learn that poor sleep and stress can make a huge difference as well. Let's start though by looking at this. Why do I lump these two topics together? Why don't I separate sleep and stress? Because they are so intimately connected. Poor sleep is a major stressor. The reason poor sleep is bad for you is because it leads to a massive stress response. Poor sleep also makes any other type of stress you have worse, whether it's relationship stress, financial stress, work stress, doesn't matter. If you're not sleeping well, it's going to make that stress worse. If you have poor sleep and you have other stresses in your life, they're going to lead to serious, serious issues. Poor sleep and stress are connected on the problem side, but they're also connected on the solution side as well. On the flip side, sleep is a key treatment for stress. Stress management is a key treatment for sleep issues. Fixing your sleep issues will help with your stress. Fixing your stress will help with your sleep issues, and then hopefully we can get both of them going in the same direction and make a huge difference. That's why I want to talk about them together. Basically, if we're talking about a study about stress, you can just change the word stress, replace it with poor sleep, and the study makes the same amount of sense. Same thing with sleep. If we're looking at a sleep study, you could replace the conversation about sleep with stress and we'd be at the same place. Let's go ahead and dive in then. Why do poor sleep and stress cause so many problems? It's because they trigger your body's fight or flight response. I love these pictures here, fighting and then fleeing at the bottom. The fight or flight response is controlled by your nervous system, specifically your sympathetic nervous system, which controls this fight or flight response. During the fight or flight response though, your body then looks for any quick fuel that it can find to prepare you to either fight for your life or to run for it. Fat is an amazing fuel source, but it is not a quick one, and that's where the problems arise. This is also why I like to think of stress, and specifically the stress hormone cortisol. I always call it anti-exercise. Cortisol's job is to modulate and control this fight or flight response system, and it does so by looking for quick fuel sources. The reason I call it anti-exercise is because it's doing the exact opposite of what we want. We exercise because we want to burn fat and build muscle, but stress and the stress hormone cortisol will tell your body to burn muscle and build or store fat. Yikes. That's the exact opposite of what we're looking to do. This makes it easy to see how poor sleep and stress can wreck your fat loss plans. We want to preserve muscle. Stress tells your body that it should be used for fuel. We want to burn fat. Stress tells your body to save fat for later because it's not a quick enough fuel for the emergency situation that you're dealing with. Now the problem is, your stress might be lasting for days, weeks, months, or years. Your body is always looking at it like it's an instant threat. This is why poor sleep and stress are wrecking your fat loss plans. Stress here's just a short list of things that stress does, and we'll look at some of these in the literature in just a second. Stress increases belly fat, increases hunger, causes hormone imbalances, increases muscle loss, and raises blood sugar, all while slowing or halting fat loss. Let's go ahead and look at some of the studies that show how poor sleep and stress are weight loss roadblocks. Let me take a quick drink. What does the science say here? The effect of acute sleep deprivation on skeletal muscle protein synthesis and the hormonal environment. So the study looked at one night of poor sleep. So imagine if you're sleeping poorly every night or if you're stressed every day or both. So one night of poor sleep, decreased muscle protein synthesis by 18%. Remember, we've been talking about that throughout this series. Anything you can do to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, eating protein, exercising, is going to preserve muscle or even build it while you lose fat. Now we're talking about poor sleep and stress decreasing muscle protein synthesis by 18%. Also decreased plasma testosterone levels by 24%, testosterone very important for males and females for preserving muscle and bone. And then that one night of poor sleep also increased the stress hormone cortisol levels by 21%. So basically here's what you saw. One night of poor sleep made every anabolic hormone which would build muscle or preserve muscle go down and made every catabolic hormone which will break muscle down and turn it into fuel go up. So this is a recipe for disaster. This creates an environment where the breakdown of muscle is almost guaranteed and I'll show you that with a sleep study later on in this video. Another study, sleep and muscle recovery, endocrinological, and molecular basis for a new and promising hypothesis. So the study found that poor sleep increased cortisol, which remember is going to break down muscle and turn it into fuel. Decreased testosterone, testosterone wants to preserve muscle and now there's not as much of it around. But also it found that there was a decrease in IGF1 or insulin like growth factor one, which is basically a proxy for growth hormone. So growth hormone testosterone levels going down, stress hormones going up. And specifically in this study they talked about how it favored the establishment of a highly proteolytic environment. So what does that mean? Proteolytic means to rip or tear or break apart proteins. So this means that poor sleep is going to break apart lean mass, break apart muscle, and what we want to be doing is breaking down fat for fuel instead. So this favors the loss of lean mass rather than fat mass. And this is the opposite of what we want to have happen. But it gets even worse than this. Not only is it telling your body to hold on to fat, it's specifically telling your body to hold on to belly fat. So let's look at this. What does the science have to say? Is visceral obesity a physiological adaptation to stress? So this review talks about the fact that your belly fat has the fat cells have four times more cortisol receptors than the fat that's in your subcutaneous fat in your limbs. So cortisol is intimately connected with what we call central obesity or belly fat or visceral fat. So abdominal obesity is actually associated with an increased cortisol clearance. So if your cortisol level goes up, what your body is doing is let's grow more abdominal fat. Let's grow more belly fat so that it can clear this cortisol from your system. So your body is basically trying to protect you from stress by piling on belly fat. Now this is shocking, but this is the truth. Then on the flip side, so visceral fat or belly fat releases chemical messengers and releases inflammation that actually stimulates the production of more cortisol. So it's a vicious cycle. Stress makes you fat, specifically in your belly, but then fat makes you stressed and the cycle continues until we break it. So I want to read a quote here from the conclusion. In this context, visceral obesity treatment should focus on stress management and weight loss strategies in order to stop this vicious circle. And I couldn't agree more. We should focus on weight loss strategies, whatever works best for you, but focusing on stress management and improving your sleep at the same time will do nothing but improve your chances of success. All right. So you see here just kind of one of my before and after pictures, but poor sleep and stress also impact our hormones in other important ways. So I've already mentioned that sleep deprivation and poor sleep timing lower testosterone levels. But to what extent are we talking about here? So the guy on the left, my testosterone levels, when I started my weight loss journey, we're at 285, which is hypogonadism, which is below normal. And then when I started sleeping, it actually went up to 717. So from 285 to 717. And the main difference that I made early on was improving my sleep. I went from sleeping four or five hours a night to probably more like nine or 10 on most nights in the beginning. Another hormone that's involved is growth hormone. We always talk about how growth hormone protects our muscle. Growth hormone helps us burn fat, all true. But at least 75% of the growth hormone that your body secretes is just secreted during deep sleep in the middle of that stage three deep sleep while you're sleeping. All right. So I've covered these topics. If you're interested in the connection, especially between poor sleep and muscle loss, here's three videos that I made that talked about this, and then actually here's three more. You can see I've done a lot of videos on this topic because it is one of my favorite topics to talk about. People are just shocked that I say how much sleep helped me on my weight loss journey, but I absolutely believe it. So much so that I have an entire six hour course on how to get better sleep to accelerate weight loss. And it's the second course I made. I made the intermittent fasting course first because that's the main thing I did to consume less calories and lose body fat. But I honestly believe that getting better sleep was the main thing that I did to remove any roadblocks to keep me from losing weight. And then this sleep course also has an entire section on stress reduction and relaxation techniques to help with sleep, but then also would help with weight loss and fat loss as well. It really is that big of a deal. But does this stuff work? We've talked about how poor sleep and stress might keep you fat and pile on belly fat, but does it actually work to try to solve this problem? So let's look at a couple more studies here. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. This is my favorite study to cite related to sleep and fat loss because it's so powerful. They looked at two groups of people. One group was sleeping 8.5 hours per night, 8.5 hours per night. One group was sleeping 5.5 hours per night. The group that was sleeping 8.5 hours a night, they lost 2.33 times more fat and 1.6 times less lean mass than the group that was sleeping 5.5 hours. I mean, these are massive differences. They lost the same amount of weight. The group that was sleeping 5.5 hours a night, only 20% of their weight loss was fat. The rest was water and lean mass. So sleep, sleeping 8.5 hours helped this group of people find their fat loss sweet spot. So one more time, the group that slept 8.5 hours per night lost 2.33 times more fat and 1.6 times less lean mass, even though both groups lost the same amount of weight. So if you want to preserve muscle while losing fat, you need to be sleeping as good as possible. Another one, the impact of a stress management program on weight loss, mental health, and lifestyle in adults with obesity, a randomized controlled trial. There were 45 adults with obesity that were enrolled in this study. Everyone received lifestyle education about how to lose weight, but half of them also received an 8-week stress management program as well, so both groups lost weight because both groups were counseled on how to lose weight. But the group that also had the stress reduction program, their BMI dropped by 3.1 points, whereas the control group that only received information about weight loss, their BMI dropped by 1.74 points. So a very significant difference, almost doubling in the drop in BMI from 30 to 27 or 25 to 22 wherever they were. All right, so I hope I've made the case that improving sleep and managing stress will help you hit your fat loss sweet spot. What you are eating is obviously very important, but what's eating you from a stress and anxiety standpoint is also very important. You need to try to lose some stress if you want to lose more weight. All right, so now we've covered all five of these topics. This is not the entire program, but these were the key things that I wanted to focus on. So I finally finished my deep dive into these top five factors that you need to control to find your fat loss sweet spot. I'm not saying that you can't lose weight if you don't do all five of these things, but if you want to maximize fat loss while preserving or hopefully even building lean mass, you need to control these five variables. These are also the key things that everyone should focus on regardless of their weight loss strategy, right? Focusing on all these points stacks the deck in your favor. So I started with these five points for that reason. I wanted these videos to be helpful for everyone who sees them, not just people that follow my programs or try to make their plan look like what I did. I've already covered the benefits of intermittent fasting and calorie cycling in other videos, and I'll cover the metabolic advantages of ketones and low carb diets in future videos. But in the next videos for this series, I want to look at signs that you're losing lean mass as well as ways to track your progress to identify small problems before they become big roadblocks to your success. I'll also share some tips on what you should do. If years of calorie cutting and yo-yo dieting have robbed you of lean mass and slowed down your metabolism. So that'll be the next few videos in this series. So I will see you there. I hope this video helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.