Never Stop learning, Food and Sleep and Sleep and Food, Don’t Let Your Emotions Scare You Off
Hi Folks! Connor and Nick here from Healthy Living With Nick and Connor. Thanks again for being on our email list, it means a lot, and we are excited to share our weekly email with you. We hope you enjoy it! Here is what we hope you take away from this one:
Keep on learning, and learn a variety of things! Growth and understanding occur exponentially.
Get familiar with your body’s connection between sleep and diet.
Don’t shy away from the emotions you feel. Learn to sit with them, engage with them and discover what they are really about.
Starter Mindset Tip: A Learning Mind is the Best Kind of Mind
Learning is crucial for a healthy mind. It is a shame when we get done with school or training and leave it behind. Granted, it can be hard to find time to learn new things and can often seem tedious, so why should we keep doing it? The benefits are nearly endless; personal growth, improved problem-solving, improved adaptability, increased perspective, expanded creativity, resilience, confidence, social connection, and the list goes on. It doesn’t matter so much what you sit down to learn, as much as that you continue to do it. The more diverse the breadth of learning the better. Maybe a new food recipe or cooking skill, a musical instrument, a new book, a historical event, a board game, a new language or dance. It often seems that inspiration in one area of your life can come from something completely unrelated as our intuition makes uncanny connections we never would have made otherwise. Put simply, a learning mind is a happy, functional mind. A mind that stops learning is often rigid, prone to rumination, isolation, lack of perspective, cognitive decline and stagnation.
Health Recipe:Your Sleep Impacts Your Diet, and Your Diet Impacts Your Sleep What Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?
Timing: The time it takes you to think about your cravings when tired
Level of Difficulty: Easy to recognize, hard to change how you respond
Serving Size: Start by just being aware of your cravings, slowly start making changes
Spice Level: She can get muy caliente when you are fighting those sleepy hunger cravings
INGREDIENTS
Yourself, your thoughts, your will to fight sleepy food cravings, and your ability to set yourself up better with quality sleep
REASONING AND BENEFITS
Think back to a time when you were not sleeping well, maybe it is right now, do you find you crave more food when you are tired? Do you find you crave all of those delicious sweet, salty, high calorie, caffeine filled foods? This is not because you are weak, or because you have poor willpower, this is based on your physiology. You have two hormones that control your appetite: (1) leptin tells us when we are full, and (2) ghrelin triggers our sense of hunger. Inadequate sleep will cause leptin levels to drop, so your body will no longer be told when it is full, and your ghrelin levels will increase, sending you more hunger pangs telling you to keep finding that delicious food you love so much. This leads to increased snacking and overeating, making you feel bad about the increased snacking and overeating, which then leads to increased snacking and overeating. That is one vicious cycle my friends. It gets worse, this insufficient sleep will cause bad bacteria to hang out in your gut microbiome, which will prevent your body from absorbing the nutrients from the good food choices that you do make. This overeating and increase in high-calorie sweets will then decrease your sleep quality. Hang in there. This is where the good news begins folks! Getting good sleep will reset the communication with these important hormones. Leptin will be able to tell you when you are full again, and ghrelin will reduce all of those hunger cravings you were fighting off while you had insufficient sleep. The good bacteria will start taking over again and absorbing those good nutrients, leading to a happier gut with less gastric pain. Good sleep will lead to better food choices, less food consumption, and then better sleep due to these good food choices. The vicious cycle has now turned into a friendly cycle. Eat well, sleep well, sleep well, eat well. You make the choice on what comes first.
INSTRUCTIONS
Awareness: how do you feel when you are overtired? Take a mental note, or write down the foods you are craving, the foods you are eating, the amount of food you are eating. How does your gut feel? Just become aware of how your body reacts to short sleeps.
Intervention: There are two paths we can go here.
a) Let’s focus on improving your sleep quantity. Give yourself the opportunity to sleep 7-9 hours to help reset the communication with the hunger bash brothers leptin and ghrelin. If you are giving yourself 7-9 hours of sleep opportunity and still feel tired, let’s work on quality. Start picking recipes in this chapter to focus on to fix your sleep quality.
b) You are in a busy stage of your life and you can’t achieve adequate sleep to help fix the bash brothers of hunger leptin and ghrelin. Let’s fight those cravings and overeating. When you notice yourself craving that second dinner plate or that sweet, salty food, have some quality food on the ready to eat instead such as fruits and veggies, or crush a ton of water, or pump out some quick exercise.
PRO TIP: The most important part here is awareness. When you start becoming more aware of the food you crave when you are tired, that is when you can start making changes to how you sleep or how you eat, leading to positive changes in both areas.
* We are cranky when we are tired, we aren’t as focused, and our nutrition takes a massive hit. Improve your sleep and you will not only fix your nutrition, but your crankiness and lack of focus. ** If you can start fighting food urges and cravings, you will be training your mind and body to get better at it. Before you know it, you will be able to say no to that one food that you have been trying to avoid for years now.
*** If you are struggling with where you should start here, flip a coin. Heads means improve your sleep first, tails means improve your nutrition first. Flip away and follow the wisdom of the coin.
Dessert Quote:
"Instead of running from our emotions or being swept away by their initial gusts, we should learn to sit with them, become at peace with their unique flavors, and ultimately discover deep pools of inspiration.” — Josh Waitzkin
Now we want to hear from YOU! Please let us know what you think of today’s newsletter, and send us an example of how you applied the health recipe to your life! We would love to share how you introduced this week’s recipe into your life’s unique menu. Thanks and have a great Sunday!
