 Hey, everybody, Dr. O. If you're watching this video, you or someone you love is currently on a diet. That's just how it is. About one in three Americans are on a diet at any given time, but more than half of Americans pay attention to their diet at some point, and then globally the numbers are very similar. If you look to your left, look to your right, somebody's on a diet. Somebody's on a weight loss journey. I'm here to make the argument that the number one roadblock that you need to remove before you go on this weight loss journey is to get your sleep in check. Poor sleep leads to all sorts of problems that make it harder for you to lose weight and especially harder to lose fat. I'm going to show you, first of all, my story. If you haven't heard it, I lost 49 pounds in 10 weeks, 101.2 pounds in six months, and 165 pounds in a year. People are shocked when I tell them, they ask me, what did you do? The first thing that I credit is getting my sleep in order. The guy on the right, he slept four or five hours a night, and he was proud of the fact that he stayed up all night working and taking care of his family. He was a martyr, and he did. He'd never made sleep a priority, and he was killing himself. It's me, of course, but I proved that I was willing to die for my family, but then I made the decision that I needed to be willing to live healthy for them, and I made myself and my sleep a priority. The guy on the left, he sleeps seven to nine hours a night, sometimes 10 when I was especially early on in my weight loss journey. I am not lying when I say that the number one thing I did to lose, especially that first 40, 50 pounds, but to lose that first 100 pounds, it was to get my sleep in order. I got more physically active. Certainly I dieted. I did my alternate day fasting routines and everything else. I started resistance training about four months into my journey. I pulled a lot of levers, but I really do think that this is the first one that you need to pull. I'm going to show you some studies that explain why. Here's me. That's not a sponge. It's actually a five-pound blob of fat. Somebody thought it was a sponge one time. I'm going to walk you through some of the key studies that show you that a lack of sleep makes you hungrier, which makes you eat more, which makes you gain fat, but then I'm going to talk about the fact that poor sleep makes you lose muscle and makes you insulin resistant, which means it creates an environment where even when you're trying to lose fat, you are more likely to lose lean tissue instead, which it's always worse. I always say this. You are better off losing nothing than losing muscle. Let's look at some of these studies here. What does the science say? I'm going to read you the study title here. The effects of sleep restriction on metabolism, related parameters and healthy adults, a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. A meta-analysis is just a study of studies. These are where we put together tons and tons of data, very, very high-level research. I love these. Test-controlled trials means that there was a control group and then there was a test group or a treatment group. In this study, what they found is that when people were sleep-deprived and we're not talking about no sleep, we're just talking about a bad night of sleep, five, five and a half hours a night, which might be a great night of sleep for you. We're not talking about someone who didn't sleep for three days. We're just talking about basic sleep restriction. In this study, this meta-analysis, they found that the average person that wasn't sleeping enough was consuming 252.8 more calories per day, which ends up being, I have to read it here, 92,272 calories in a year, which would be 26 pounds of fat. This study obviously also found that people were gaining weight if they weren't sleeping. Also, they had decreased insulin sensitivity, which is really one step before insulin resistance, which is one step before prediabetes and then full-blown diabetes. It gets even worse. This analysis, the effects of partial sleep deprivation on energy balance, a systematic review and meta-analysis. This one found that when people were partially sleep deprived, they would consume 385 more calories per day. Their protein intake went down, whereas their fat and carbon intake went up. They were eating more calories, but they were eating less satisfying calories and they weren't eating better. They weren't craving kale, right? They were craving junk food, basically, is what this study found. There is some good news here. This study also looked at what happens with sleep extension. When you take people that are whatever their amount they're eating, and you get them to sleep more, they actually decrease their calorie intake by 156 calories per day. I ran the numbers. If you go from eating 385 too many calories to 156 less calories, you get a difference of 541 calories, which is 197,465 calories per year, and that would be 56 pounds of fat-worthy calories. I'm not saying that sleep is the only thing that you have to worry about, but if you want to stop gaining weight and you want to lose weight, then of course you want to be in a situation where you consume less calories. What it looks like, sleep will help you consume less calories. For some people, just getting your sleep in order could cause your appetite to come down, could cause you to change your food choices enough where you consume less calories, and then you would over time you would lose weight. That's great news. Again, it's not the only lever that I pulled. It's not the only lever I recommend that you pull, but this is why I call it the number one roadblock. If you don't get this out of the way, how are you going to be in a calorie deficit when your body wants you to eat more calories than you need? Another one here, very important one, short sleep duration is associated with reduced leptin, elevated grayling, and increased body mass index. Let's talk about what those things are. Leptin is a satiety hormone. It's a hormone that's produced by your fat cells. You may not know that, but your fat is an entericant tissue. It's a hormone produced by your fat cells that goes to the hypothalamus of your brain and tells your body how much fat you have. It's basically like the fuel gauge for your body. Your brain needs to know how many calories do we have available? Do we have enough calories to move? Do we have enough calories to reproduce? These are all things that leptin controls. If your leptin levels are high, then you won't be hungry and you will be motivated to move. If your leptin levels are low, you're going to be hungry and your brain's going to say, why don't you take it easy? Why don't you limit subconsciously, but why don't you limit how much you move? Because we don't have any calories to waste. High leptin, you will eat less and move more. Low leptin, you will eat more and move less. Then we have elevated graylin. Graylin is a hunger hormone that's released by your stomach when it's empty. Basically, if your leptin levels are low and your graylin levels are high, you're going to be very hungry, which is why you'll consume more calories. Then obviously, increase body mass index. If you're eating more than you need to be and you're hungrier than you should be, then you're probably going to gain weight and you're going to gain fat and your BMI is going to go up. The main reason I wanted to talk about this study is it also showed that you see a huge spike in cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone. Why is that? Sleep deprivation is a stressor. That's why it's so harmful for your body to not sleep. It's basically just a massive stress on your body. With cortisol goes up. The problem with that is cortisol is mobilizing energy for the fight or flight response. If you need energy quickly, then you're not going to use fat. It's a great fuel source, but it burns really slowly. If you need energy quickly, you're going to need glucose. Your body, cortisol is going to mobilize the production of blood glucose. It's called gluconeogenesis, or the creation of new glucose or sugar. The best way to do that is to use other tissues, not fat. It's to use lean mass. It's to turn proteins and muscle into glucose instead of burning fat for fuel. We'll see why that's a huge problem moving forward. Another thing this study showed is that cortisol and stress, what it does is it actually causes a partial shutdown of the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain that makes us human. Animals have, we have like a lizard brain when it comes to our brainstem, but then we have this massive frontal lobe sitting on top of our brains, and that's what makes us different. It's what makes us human, but if we shut off the prefrontal cortex, then we have a harder time controlling our emotions and controlling our decisions. It's like when you're drunk. If you drink too much alcohol, you have a partial shutdown of your brain, and that's why we make poor decisions if we've been drinking and you become much more instinctual. How I like to look at it is that when your prefrontal cortex is fully on and engaged, you can respond to the world around you. When it's partially shut down, you react to the world around you. This is why I got so fascinated with sleep research to begin with, is I was tired. I wasn't sleeping very much and I certainly wasn't healthy, but I would also snap at the kids when they made mistakes. I would react to the world around me. I would get angry. I would make poor choices because I was tired and my brain wasn't functioning properly. I wanted to respond to my world. When things happen around me, I want to pause, I want to think about it, and I want to respond. I always say you want to respond to your world, not react to it, but think about what that means from a food standpoint. If you put a donut in front of me right now, I would just say, no, thank you. It's not part of my meal plan. It's not part of my strategy. I would respond to an environment that had a donut in it. If I was super sleep deprived, I may react to a world or an environment that has a donut in it. If you're just reacting to your world, my brain would tell me to eat that donut. Hey, that's calories. We might need those in the future. There might be a famine coming. My brain is always telling me to eat the donut, but if I respond to my world, I can say no. If I react to the world, I'm more likely to say yes. That's why this huge stress response causes you to consume more foods and also consume the wrong foods. But weight, it gets worse. So here we see my least favorite picture, but I always like to say I hate this picture, but I'm falling in love with it because this is the one I keep in my wallet. That's why it looks so bad. It's folded up in my wallet and this is the picture I keep with me to remind me that I'm never going back there. My least favorite picture in the world, that's me there on the left, as you can probably tell. So this is, I'm on the same journey as you if you're trying to lose weight. I'm just ahead of you and I have a lifetime ahead of me though where I have to maintain my weight loss. But so we just explained, I just explained how poor sleep made you gain fat by causing you to eat more and make poorer food choices. But it also makes it much harder to lose it. So let's go ahead and look at what the science has about that. So this is terrifying, honestly. Like this is a huge, huge deal. So insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity, which adiposity is a fancy way of saying fat. So insufficient sleep makes it harder for you to lose fat and this study showed just that in really a terrifying way if you ask me. So we had two groups in this randomized control trial. We had a group that was sleeping five and a half hours a night and a group that was sleeping eight and a half hours a night. All of them were on a 700 calorie per day deficit. Nothing, that's not an extreme diet. That's a very typical diet. Here's the thing. Both groups lost the same amount of weight, 6.6 pounds over the time of the study. But the group that slept eight and a half hours lost 2.33 times more fat and 1.6 times less lean tissue. So they both lost the same amount of weight, but the composition of the weight they lost was completely different. So your good sleepers, they lost 3.1 pounds of fat and around 3.3 pounds of lean tissue give or take there. There's some calculation error, but they lost let's say 3.5 pounds of fat and 3.3 pounds of lean tissue. So that's not great. I'll come back to how we can get that 3.3 number lower in just a moment. But the poor sleepers, only 20% of the weight they lost was fat. They lost 5.3 pounds of lean tissue and only 1.3 pounds of fat. So that means that 80% of the weight they lost was lean tissue that you don't want to lose because muscle is metabolically active, it helps your body use glucose, it keeps you functional. So almost all of the weight that the poor sleepers lost was precious, precious lean tissue and only 20% of the weight they lost was actual body fat. So the good sleepers, they lost 2.33 times more body fat and 1.6 times less lean tissue. So if you go on a diet today, you can lose weight whether you're tired or not, whether you're sleeping well or not, but the composition of what you lose will change. And that goes back to what I mentioned earlier about how sleep deprivation is a huge stressor. And if you're stressed, your body is mobilizing energy. You need to fight, you need to run. So we're gonna mobilize energy. We don't have time to burn fat. Let's burn muscle instead. That's what's happening. That's what's happening to this group of people. But we looked at that number, like I think this study showed us another really important topic here. And that is that if you are on a diet, you have to add resistance training. I know some people wanna diet without exercise. I know some people can't exercise a lot, but you need to do, you need to challenge your body because if you do that, whether you're looking at, whether you're looking at body weight squats or push-ups or walking up and down the stairs, you use resistance bands or you do full-on, hire a personal trainer and do a full-on exercise program. You need to do that to send a signal to your body that your muscles aren't fuel, that your muscles are needed. So yes, eating more protein will preserve a little bit of lean mass, but study after study after study shows that exercise and not cardio, resistance training, whether it's body weight or lifting weights, like you see here in this picture, exercising, resistance training, strength training tells your body we can't use our muscle for fuel because we need it and it's going to greatly decrease the amount of weight you lose that is lean tissue versus fat. So let's use me as an example before we end up here. So the proof is in the pudding. So what does all this mean? What did we learn here? We learned that if you don't get that sleep roadblock out of the way, you're gonna gain weight and if you do lose weight, it's gonna be precious lean tissue and it's not gonna be fat. So this is a terrible idea. So I use these two pictures, they're the ones that they had up at my work and the picture on the left was when I'd lost right around the 100 pounds. So I get resting energy expenditure tests done, I get DEXA scans done, I've documented my entire journey and that's what I'm sharing it with you now. So the first 100 pounds I lost, 88% of it was fat and 12% of it was lean tissue and that's a really good number because fat is in the 100% fat. Fat has proteins in it, fat has cellular structures in it, fat has water. So I basically lost all body fat without losing any lean tissue while I lost 100 pounds or it's truly amazing. But then when I lost the next 65 pounds of fat, I actually gained 15 pounds of lean mass because I started doing more resistance training and lifting more weights. So I lost 165 pounds of fat and on that journey, I actually gained 15 pounds of lean mass instead of losing it and how did I do that? I got these roadblocks out of the way. I dealt with my sleep, I dealt with my stress, I was smart about my diet, all things that I'll teach you in the coming lessons. So the last thing I'm gonna leave you with here, you are not ready for weight loss until you remove these roadblocks, until you handle things like sleep and stress. I tried to lose weight 40 times in my life and I failed 39 of them because I wasn't dealing with these types of things. Getting my sleep in order allowed me to make enough progress that I could continue to make more and more progress as I moved forward. I like to say that I spiraled into control. We always talk about spiraling out of control. So please take this seriously. I shared the science behind it, I shared my personal story and I certainly hope that it helps you. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.