Good sleep is essential for physical health and overall wellness. It plays as an important role in weight loss as diet and exercise—and without good sleep, most people gain weight. Sleep deprivation also negatively impacts hormones, cognitive function and athletic performance. As a transformational nutrition and fitness coach, one of the many things I help clients do is develop a healthy sleep schedule.

Your daily habits and behaviors can promote quality sleep or lead to sleep deprivation. Stress, hectic work schedules and illness can also interfere with sleep quality. While some factors may be out of your control, there are steps you can take to get a good night’s sleep.

1. Adopt a Consistent Schedule

Your body's circadian rhythm, also known as the sleep-wake cycle, functions in alignment with sunrise and sunset. Irregular sleep patterns disrupt this cycle while consistency reinforces the sleep-wake cycle and makes it function optimally. Strive to wake up and go to...

Sleep is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle, especially when you’re trying to lose weight. A good night’s sleep repairs cellular damage, improves mental focus, boosts immunity and helps facilitate weight loss. Together with diet and exercise, sleep provides the foundation of your long-term health and wellness—it can prevent heart disease, promote healing and prevent excess weight gain. Every good weight loss specialist will tell you that sleep is critical to achieving long-term results.

Just like diet affects quality of sleep, how much you sleep impacts your diet.

Sleep-Deprivation Stimulates Appetite

When you’re not getting adequate sleep, you’re more likely to overeat and snack. This is because sleep affects two critical hormones that regulate hunger: ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin, which is produced by cells within the digestive tract, signals the brain that you’re hungry, increases consumption and promotes fat storage. Leptin, often...

Fatigue can have a significant impact on every area of your life. Have you ever had that feeling when you are desperate to sleep, but you are lying in bed staring at the ceiling? Your thoughts are going around your head like they are a high-speed train trapped on a never-ending circular track. You know that as the new day dawns, you will feel irritated, fed up, and exhausted.

The worst part? This pattern is happening night after night. And you can’t figure out why you can’t get some valuable and restorative rest when you are so tired. 

When you are suffering from fatigue, it starts to impact your ability to focus on work, and how you care for your children. You begin to feel like you are not fully engaged, and you struggle to do exercise. Your eating patterns may go awry, and you strive to have healthy regular meals. And this can, of course, lead to weight gain. Which makes you even more miserable and fed up.

Added to this, you are stressed because you are not...