Sleep: Brain Fitness and Weight Loss

I’ve written before about the key role of sleep in memory and brain fitness. Sleep deprivation has a negative effect on memory, concentration, and decision-making. Like depression, many of us think about sleep as something that goes on independent of other chemical processes in the body, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Now a new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that losing weight may be harder if you don’t get enough sleep. Researchers at the US Food and Drug Administration showed that people on a diet and who were deprived of enough sleep (they only got 5 1/2 hours a night)  lost less fat than a similar group who got 8 1/2 hours of sleep. Worse in some ways was the fact that the sleep-restricted group lost weight from lean body mass (for example, muscle) more than the group who got enough sleep. People who are dieting and exercising in order to cut down fat and increase lean body mass should thus definitely be getting enough sleep.

In the past decade, researchers have focused interest on a neurohormone called ghrelin. It’s involved in sleep, appetite regulation, and energy metabolism. So once again the body’s neurochemistry links sleep and appetite. Both getting enough sleep and maintaining a healthy body weight are key to brain fitness.

Reference:

Nedeltcheva AV et a. (2010). Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Annals of Internal Medicine, 153;435-441.  Read the abstract here.

The First Step: Beginning a Brain Fitness Program

If you read articles on the Internet about brain fitness, it can be confusing. The most money and best ads advertise computer-based training (either expensive software or monthly charges). The best scientific research supports the exercise and diet. If you want to start a brain fitness program, what’s your first step?

Decide on a goal. What do you want to get out of a brain fitness program? Fewer memory lapses, keeping yourself at the top of your class, or being faster on a computer game?

Decide on a strategy. Most studies show that what you train should be similar to what you want to get better at. If you want fewer memory lapses. focus on attention and repetition – strategies to ensure that you take in information and encode it. If you want to stay at (or get to) the top of your class in school, decide on what you need to do to get or stay there. Is it more studying, more effective concentration, or learning something that is a prerequisite to what you’re doing now? And if you want to be faster than your friends on a computer game, there’s only one sure strategy: practice.

Decide how to stick with your strategy. The world is full of people who start fitness programs, but has fewer people who actually stick with a fitness program. The key to developing greater brain fitness is to stick with your plan.

You should make your plan do-able, and you choose what you want to do so that it fits easily into your life. If you’re busy with a job and family, it’s probably unrealistic to start out exercising two hours a day. First, find 10 minutes a day for a brain fitness activity.
You can always add on later, but getting in the habit of doing something every day may be the single most important thing you can do to get started and keep going. Finally, make sure that your initial goals are not only realistic but are actually easy for you.

Getting in the habit of setting goals and achieving them will help you keep going when things get harder.