SLEEP DISTURBANCE

I have been lecturing on sleep disturbances for a few years now, and waking up in the middle of the night is definitely one of the top reasons people come to my lectures. If the exhausted crowds at my talks are anything to go by, the typical insomnia stats seem to severely underrepresent this problem.

There are many types of sleep disturbances, such as difficulty getting to sleep, waking up every couple of hours or awake too early. But waking up at or around 3:00 am is a particularly common type of sleep problem that frequently has an unexpected crony: belly fat. Appreciating the connection between these two may help you get two outs with one pitch.

For years researchers at the Vancouver-based Canadian Centre for Functional Medicine heard the same comment from participants in their weight loss trials: “I’m sleeping better”. 

Since these were weight loss studies and not sleep studies, researchers didn’t pay too much attention to this added benefit at first. Then they began to employ a technology that monitored participants’ blood sugar levels continuously (every few seconds) for periods of 24 hours and longer.

This revealed trends in blood sugar changes that they had never seen before, and it led to an astonishing realization: many people waking up at 3:00 am were experiencing a sudden drop in blood sugar just prior to waking up – a phenomenon known as nocturnal hypoglycaemia.

HOW ABDOMINAL FAT IS DIFFERENT

No one is crazy about having excess fat anywhere on our bodies, but fat cells in our arms and legs are usually just inert insulation. Abdominal fat cells, on the other hand, once they reach a critical mass, actually change their function and begin to act like endocrine glands, meaning they begin to respond to hormonal input, and even secrete hormones in return. Functioning as endocrine glands, these cells are not much affected by diet and exercise, which is why abdominal fat is so darn difficult to shed.

Once abdominal fat has morphed into an endocrine gland, the whole weight-loss matter of calories-in versus calories-out equation doesn’t apply anymore. What now governs these fat cells is hormonal input. The hormones insulin and cortisol send powerful messages to cause those belly fat cells to continue growing. Since most diets don’t address hormone levels, they are ultimately ineffective at reducing weight where we would mostly like to lose it – in our belly.

By the way, when I say abdominal fat I’m not talking about that small roll of a few pounds that can appear seemingly overnight sometime around menopause. In the absence of other symptoms like cravings and insomnia, that little bit of pudge is generally not harmful and in fact can be very helpful in buffering changes in estrogen levels.