Your Body Needs to Eat, Sleep and Exercise

Getting 20 – 30 of exercise per day can actually not only improve your health but also help you get better sleep each night. A recent study just released suggests that 150 minutes of exercise per week can help you get more sleep at night. The study showed that sleep quality improved by 65%. Not only did the study show that exercise directly affects your sleep but also effecting your concentration during the day and leg cramping at night. The study was done at Oregon State University one of the leading institutions in sleep and fitness research. Studying the sleep of more than 2,600 people aged 18 – 85.

Most people know that exercise and a healthy diet are the 2 major factors of losing weight and getting in shape. However, getting enough sleep at night is just as important as the other two. If you stop and think about it, we may workout at most an hour or an hour and a half per day. We may eat 3 to 4 meals and each meal may only take 30 minutes. This means that we sleep twice as long everyday then we do eating and exercising.

There must be a reason we sleep so much. There is, we sleep to rebuild, recharge, and rejuvenate our bodies. The national sleep foundation recommends that we sleep 7-9 hours per night depending on our age. If you have ever got less than 7 hours of sleep in a night you understand that feeling of your body not being completely recharged.

Sleep is a crucial factor in losing weight. Sleep suppresses your appetite and raises your metabolism, while allowing your body to rest and recover. The problem is that sleep is your base. Sleep is the first thing that you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night. When you wake up not feeling your best often times we cut out things from our day that we would normally do if we were fully rested. Eating breakfast is the best way to start your day off right. However, it’s usually one of the first things to be cut when we don’t get enough sleep.

This begins a slippery slope of the start to a very unhealthy day. If you don’t eat breakfast you are 67% more likely to also skip your day’s work out. While some people do skip breakfast and still workout if you skip 2 meals in one day you are 91% more likely to not workout. Sometime we get busy that is every understandable, but getting a great workout in should never take a back seat to anything. Try these 4 ways to fit in fitness.  Next time you miss a meal remember you have a lot of reasons to run so don’t miss a meal. This all comes back to time management. If we try to fit 1,000,000 things into a day something’s are going to get left out. One of my favorite quotes comes from Dean of Students at Dixie State College of Utah, Del Beatty.

“Over extending yourself to please everyone will make you a jack of all trades and a master at none.”  – Del Beatty

If there is one thing we should all be a master of is must be the health of our bodies. Our bodies should be the most important thing we do in our lives. Without a strong healthy body nothing else will matter. The moral of the story is that we must eat, sleep and exercise to keep our bodies in the best shape. So aside from leading an active lifestyle and maintaining a balanced diet, you should also make sure that you get your full eight hours of shuteye every night and become the master of your own body. Remember don’t give up, it takes 4 weeks to see changes in our bodies, 8 weeks for our friends and family to see the change and 12 weeks for the rest of the world. Hang in there. Eat, Sleep and Exercise because nothing else matters.