It’s no surprise sleep can turn a good day great, or a bad day worse but a new Aussie study has revealed the surprisingly small mistake quietly wrecking the nation’s exercise routines.
For years, Sydney executive Danielle Handley couldn’t work out why her health routine wasn’t paying off.
“I’d be pretty disciplined on my diet, I’d be exercising constantly, and I’d just not get anywhere,” the 47-year-old mother-of-three said.
The problem wasn’t her effort or her exercise routine, it was her sleep.
New Australian data has revealed just how quickly poor sleep can derail an otherwise solid health routine, and cravings are often the first sign something’s gone awry.
After just two or more nights without good sleep, people took 2,220 fewer steps, cut their active minutes by more than half and increased the chance of not finishing a planned workout from 72 per cent to just 37 per cent, an analysis of 3,600 users of health app Healthier found.
At the same time, strong cravings jumped from 28 per cent to 45 per cent, with half of the nutrition, exercise and recovery app users giving in to sweet or savoury snacks and eating around 185 more calories a day.
For Ms Handley, who juggles a demanding executive career with her recent passion to run her first full marathon before 50, the pattern only became apparent when she started tracking her health as a whole, including sleep, diet, exercise and mood.
“Looking at my sleep pattern, it was probably the main instigator of why I wasn’t getting anywhere,” she said.
The turning point was realising her biggest obstacle wasn’t always food but also alcohol.
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, just how much alcohol impacts my sleep,” she added.
She and her husband have since cut back on their weekly drinking along with ditching a cup of tea and a biscuit before sleep, and avoiding food for at least two hours before bed to quieten food noise the next day.
“Now I know I’m getting a much better quality of sleep,” she said. “It’s not that sluggish feeling as much hormonal as it is dietary.”
Dr Julie Manasseh, a GP with a special interest in obesity and weight management, said the findings reflect decades of research and a pattern she sees constantly in her clinic.
“Sleep is one of the foundational pillars of health,” Dr Manasseh said.
“What they’ve shown in their study about poor sleep negatively impacting exercise and increasing appetite and cravings is absolutely consistent with many studies that have been done over time.”
Crucially, she revealed, there’s a difference between hunger and cravings and most people don’t realise poor sleep is driving the latter.
“Appetite is actual physiological hunger … but cravings come from a different area of the brain, where reward is involved. We call it hedonic eating,” she says.
“People are often totally unaware of the connection between poor sleep and then the next stage just wanting to eat a bag of chips.”
Dr Manasseh says many patients have simply normalised chronically poor sleep.
“They say, ‘that’s just me, I normally don’t sleep,’ … that’s not normal, that’s not good.”
Her advice is to aim for around eight hours, timed with your body’s natural rhythm, ideally going to bed a couple of hours before midnight and following a natural circadian rhythm for a deeper sleep.
For Ms Handley, what helped her to hack her health in the last 18 months was not to underestimate the importance of sleep and gaining better results in her workouts, marathon training, energy and diet.