Weight Loss Associated with 9 hours or more Sleep

I was watching Brian Williams on NBC News on TV and it was said that weight loss is associated with 9 hours or more sleep a night. And I thought to myself why this would be true. The first thing that comes to mind is that when you are sleeping you are not eating or drinking anything. So, in this sense you are fasting because you are not eating for 9 hours or more during the night or whenever you sleep. The second thing I know is that the hours between 11pm and 1am are the most important hours for a body to sleep in any given area on earth. However, often I am myself awake during this time of night while writing, reading or watching TV because I have always been a night owl. And conversely I have known that every woman I have known has been a morning person that goes to bed early. So, this often is the difference between men and women I guess. The next thing that comes to mind is that if you are sleeping 9 hours or more a night you are usually feeling safe enough in your life to do that. Either you are safe in your relationships or you are safe financially or you live in a quiet neighborhood where you can safely sleep in peace. So, this likely hearkens back to when people had to get up and run more from animals or people when they REALLY didn't feel safe where they lived on earth. So, when I put all these things together it starts to make much more sense about how getting over 9 hours sleep a night helps a person lose weight. One more thing I realized is that one has the time for deep cycle dreaming which in some ways is better than any therapist or psychologist in healing our inner wounds from childhood or everyday experiences. However, I'm not sure all this would be true if one were using any kind of sleeping pills because this alters the brain chemistry much like caffeine, or cocaine, or other stimulants do. Even though sleeping pills are not a stimulant they cause the body to compensate for the sleeping pill and then a person needs more and more sleeping pills to sleep. So, once you embark down the path of sleeping pills it is an endless cycle until you go off them and just don't sleep at all for a while until you can sleep naturally once again.

By the way my Wife and Son bought me through amazon.com two diet books called, "The New Atkins for a new you" and "The South Beach Diet Supercharged". Since my son is a nurse these books likely will be helpful not only to me but to many of you as well. Also, if you join amazon prime which is a little similar to netflix where you can rent many first run movies online for a couple of bucks and many are free with the service too you can then get ANYTHING you buy from amazon.com shipped to you free as long as you are paying the approximately 80 dollars a year by subscribing to amazon prime.

At my doctor's recommendation I have eliminated carbohydrates from my diet "pretty much" since last Thursday. Once I realized that I needed to be thinner to keep healthy at 64 years of age ongoing I learned from my doctor how to "make it my job" to only eat protein, vegetables and fruits for the first month. I'm only allowing myself 1 to 2 pieces of bread a day, either within a sandwich or as a part of my protein drink in the morning with peanut butter on one or both of them to start out my day with enough protein so I don't either go into a hypoglycemic cascade from not enough protein first thing in the morning or get hungry from not putting enough protein in my body first off.

For me, since I was raised a lacto-ovo vegetarian when I was growing up in the 1950s in Los Angeles, I naturally became a carbo loader because the energy from carbohydrates goes either directly into energy but if you don't immediately use it eventually does directly into fat. So, any person who wants to lose weight has to either severely reduce carbs and fatty meats or they are never going to lose weight. So, the biggest thing appears to be convincing yourself on a survival level that, "I don't live to eat, I eat to live!" which is a very big difference in how one perceives reality. In the first if you "live to eat" psychologically food is an addiction just like many people become love addicts and in that case one overcomes love addiction by realizing that love is mostly meant for procreation of the species. This doesn't stop people from having fantasies but living out your fantasies with food and with people you aren't married to almost always causes problems for someone.

However, I must admit you appear to be able to get away with a lot more of this when you are young than when you are older. But sooner or later if one wants to continue to be alive and to have a good life both for one's own sake and for all one's relatives and friends one has to get realistic about all this at some point and to take full charge of their lives in order have self respect for oneself ongoing. This also contributes to everyone else respecting you too.

For me, the most frustrating thing about all this is that I never had any kind of weight problem until I hit my mid 40s. I had been jogging 1 to 5 miles a day since my early teens as a way for me to stay fit. But probably two things stopped all this by my mid 40s. The first is that as a child up to about 15 I used to jump off of roofs as a macho thing that my friends and I did at that time. However, when I went to my podiatrist she took x-rays of my feet and found all sorts of healed over fractures from my days of jumping off of roofs. And the second thing is that I am half Scottish and so even though I am almost 6 foot 5 inches tall I am also very big boned and have never been able to break any major bones in my body outside of my nose and little toe and a slight fracture of my right wrist in a motorcycle collision while out dirt riding in my 20s. But it might be that being big boned, having little fractures in my feet as a child all worked against me starting in my 40s to prevent me from continuing my happy practice of jogging 1 to 5 miles a day. This was awful for me because I had nothing to replace this with. So, sometimes now I walk up to 5 miles or I take cardio rides on my mountain bike uphills so I still get that heart workout that jogging always brought to me. Also, I make it a practice of lifting weight of about 50 pounds above my head to prevent rotator cusp problems later in life. My wife's step father can't lift his hands above his head at 93 but he was able to fly me still in his Beechcraft V tail plane in his early 80s. So longevity is in his family as all his brothers have passed away in their late 90s. Since I just turned 64 if I take care of myself there is a good chance I will still be here in my 90s and 100s too.