What you eat affects your sleep

If you’re having trouble with your sleep,
you’ve likely tried many ways to tackle it.
Are you aware what you eat affects your sleep?

Many thousands of years ago humans rarely had exposure to sweetened foods.
Food was scarce. There were many famines and agriculture was not yet a thing.

Hunter-gatherers would sometimes have feast or famine scenarios,
where they’d go days without food and then they’d kill an animal and have lots of food in a short time.

Because of this, humans developed a craving for foods that were highly calorie dense.
They tend to be sugar dense foods, rich fats.
and that was part of our biological make up for most of human civilisation.
Agriculture is relatively new to our biology and so our bodies still have the same biological cravings they’ve had for thousands of years.

The problem is now it is extremely easy to find sugar-dense foods,
and most of us eat far too much of it, much more than our physiology can metabolise.

We can now consume more fast acting carbs in one meal than our ancestors would have consumed in a lifetime.
And our bodies have not yet evolved to deal with that.

We don’t have sensory feedback to handle this because it wasn’t anything that ever happened.

Therefore, it’s so easy to stuff ourselves with sugary foods.
When eating an enormous meal that is particularly sugar-dense,
there is no signal in the body to let us know the damage that has been caused internally,
and when this is repeated frequently, vast amounts of damage are done.
This leads to chronic conditions and a LOT of inflammation.

High inflammation affects your sleep, and poor sleep affects how your body handles inflammation.
It’s a vicious feedback loop.
The quality of your sleep and the consistency of your sleep affects how your metabolic system functions.
When you’re in this feedback loop, it is very easy to spiral down with worse and worse outcomes.

No one WANTS to be unhealthy. The reward is not worth the penalty.
Eating lots of desserts WILL cause issues.
That is simply a matter of time.
But those issues affect not only weight. They can lead to many chronic conditions,
reduce your physical levels of activity, making people more sedentary.
They’ll negatively affect the respiratory system, leading to breathlessness far quicker and poor functional breathing.
And high amounts of inflammation play havoc with the immune system,
and can play havoc with sleep.

I help my clients create habits that result in better nutrition and sleep.
If that sounds of interest, please do get in touch.