Thread: Does too little sleep lead to weight gain?

The three pillars of a good "fitness lifestyle" = diet (how you fuel) + training/cardio (how you expend your energy) + recovery.

Poor recovery (i.e. not enough, poor quality sleep) = stress = cortisol = fat.

This is absolutely my experience.....I can hit a plateau from three bad nights in a row, and completely reverse it with a few nights of 7+ hrs......also will halt any gains....I seem to be the poster child for this phenomenon

too bad I have insomnia.

This is one of the biggest challenges I've found of trying to do competition prep. There is literally no time to spare to get in bed early in order to keep up the pace. I have always been a night owl and I like to stay up a little later to have some time to just sit and browse email, stare at the tv or read a book. This is something I just have to fight the urge to do, and go straight to bed if I have any chance of keeping up a schedule of morning cardio, my regular workday, PM training + cardio, get home, make food, lay out everything for the next day and get to bed. Incidental stuff like, doing laundry, keeping the house clean, getting gas in my car... all of this stuff always suffers because my daily schedule just barely has enough time to get enough done to get me to the next day. Then, when competition stress starts to do things like make you not able to relax and get to sleep, everything hurts, cramping from water drop, etc. That is when I really start to panic because losing a night of sleep has a couple days' worth of repercussion to recover.