Fasting for Better Sleep!

What and when you eat play a HUGE role in the quality of your sleep. And the quality of your sleep plays a HUGE role in every aspect of your waking life!

In the words of Dr. Peter Martone, “Food and “food timing” plays a huge role in sleep. So if the goal is to get better sleep, the timing of your food, as in, what you eat is important.  You don’t want your blood sugar levels to drop too much at night. That’s what happened the first night. As you’re fasting, your blood sugar levels dropped, your body goes into kind of like a survival mode and it interrupts your sleep patterns.

Anything that you do differently will interrupt your sleep patterns. And then as you go into another night, the body adapts a little bit more. I like to see trends, so when you’re looking at that, more often than not, people that are eating the wrong foods before they go to bed, they’re eating too late. Before they go to bed, they’re elevating the core body temperatures. Core body temperatures are too high because you’re metabolizing food and you’re not able to drop into a nice cold temperatures. So, your body isn’t able to get that deep sleep.

So, intermittent fasting, especially if you’re good with your timing, helps regulate all those patterns. But you still want to make sure that you don’t eat late at night. You can actually eat late at night. You just can’t eat a lot of food late at night. You want to have food in your stomach. You want to have food in your digestive track during the middle of night because you don’t want your blood sugar levels to drop too much. But you have to play kind of a fine line. So let’s let’s look at this. Let’s say you have a big bowl of pasta, (and I’m not a big gluten fan and I’m not a big carbohydrate fan anyway) but let’s say you have a big Thanksgiving dinner. Okay. I don’t care if you have it at five o’clock in the afternoon or at six o’clock in the afternoon, you still will not get a good night’s sleep that night because it takes so much time to digest the complexity of all of that food.

So, let’s say you have to eat. And the people that can’t go to sleep starving or don’t don’t want to go to sleep really hungry, they’re correct because you want some food. It all depends on your blood sugar levels. So if you are really hungry, what do you eat before you go to bed? You can have a little bit of like, gluten free tofu with maybe a little bit of butter on there, a scoop of sunflower butter or something like that that goes into your stomach, a little bit that is slowly digested during the night. You don’t want a lot of food in your system, because that elevates your body’s core temperature. So if you eat food, then you wait a couple hours, you’ll notice that you won’t get warm, because this heat is produced when you digest your food. You don’t want that to interrupt with your sleep patterns. That makes sense. So you want to have a little bit more of a fat before you go to bed like avocado would be a good thing that you could have right before bed. Something that’s easily easy, easily digestible on your stomach.”

 

To enjoy the FULL episode, click right here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/177-does-intermittent-fasting-help-sleep-dr-peter-martone/id1318445077?i=1000463795534