Sleep Well, Drink Well & Be Renewed - YLAM250037

SPEAKER 1 This program presents ways to optimise health and well being. When considering lifestyle changes, please consult with your healthcare provider to assure they are suitable for you. SPEAKER 2 Hello and welcome. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Sometimes lifestyle habits can affect us in surprising ways. For example, did you know that chronic lack of sleep can make you hungrier? And here's another one, drinking more water can actually help you lose weight. Intriguing. Hey, stay with us as we explore this more. SPEAKER 1 This is your lifestyle as medicine, a production of 3 ABN Australia Television. SPEAKER 2 It's great to have you on this program where we look at ways that you can shape your lifestyle as medicine. Our topic today is sleep well, drink well and be renewed. Joining us to discuss this is Lorenzo Berry, a lifestyle coach with a graduate diploma in lifestyle medicine. Welcome, Lorenzo. Thank you so much for joining us once more. SPEAKER 1 Hi, Kaysie, it's great to be with you again. SPEAKER 2 Indeed. So glad you could share your time and knowledge today. Really, really looking forward to our conversation. So your top sleep well, drink well and be renewed. I love it. What are we talking about here? When we're saying be renewed, what are you referring to there? SPEAKER 1 Yeah, well, I did think about calling it sleeping and drinking your way to a slimmer you, but I thought that would be too corny and sounds almost too good to be true. SPEAKER 2 Okay, so, yeah, so we're talking about a weight connection here, weight management, but also so just overall health benefits in the mix. SPEAKER 1 It is, it's not just about weight management. This is about a greater sense of well being. SPEAKER 2 Yeah. Okay, lovely. Very nice. Okay, so sleep, sleep well. Where do we start with that? SPEAKER 1 Well, look, sleep. Maybe we just put that up on the screen. At the moment, the recommendation of how much sleep we should be getting depending on our what age group we're in. Really from the US data, as you just find your way there on the chart, it would seem that there's an increasing number of people and certainly the conversations I'm having as a lifestyle coach in Australia and overseas is that people aren't sleeping as long as they used to. And for the U.S. if we just jump to the next slide, we'll see that the number of U.S. adults that are sleeping six hours a day or less is quite high, 33%. Now, the interesting part of this, if the viewers are able to see the title on those two columns, one is about sleep, the other one is about obesity and we can see that they're growing basically parallel. And so this is concerning a lot of health researchers and part of the reason why sleep researchers are drawing A conclusion that there is a link between how long we sleep and the quality of our sleep with our likelihood to becoming obese. SPEAKER 2 Okay, interesting. And based on the recommendations on that first slide there, it seems like we should be having from seven to nine hours of sleep. But a lot of us are obviously having, as it was saying, short sleeper. So six or less, which is, you know, we're missing out on a key couple of hours there every night. It seems like many. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. And that couple of hours shortfall that you just mentioned, Kaysie, is really critical. SPEAKER 2 Okay. SPEAKER 1 Now, the sleep researchers aren't exactly able to say why where there's this almost parallel experience between sleepless deprivation or short sleep and obesity. But what we do know from those who are chronically under sleeping is that one of the things that takes place is that our blood sugar levels rise. So irrespective of what we're eating during the day, irrespective of whether we're diabetic or not, if we're chronically getting less, now, seven to nine hours as an average adult sleep, our blood sugar levels just increase, and they stay increased throughout the day. SPEAKER 2 So that would then almost suggest that not enough sleep could then be a risk factor for something like diabetes if it's adding to the blood sugar level. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. Yeah, it is. But it doesn't act alone. There's a couple of other things that take place, too. SPEAKER 2 Okay? SPEAKER 1 There's some. There's some hormones that control or regulate our appetite. One of them is called ghrelin. Okay. So ghrelin is what makes us feel as though we want to eat. And then there's another one. Its friend is called leptin. Now, leptin is like our cutoff switch that says, oh, you've eaten enough. SPEAKER 2 Okay? SPEAKER 1 But if we're chronically short sleeping, ghrelin becomes more active, and leptin tends to go on holidays. SPEAKER 2 Okay. SPEAKER 1 So that means that we want to eat more because we have a higher sense of hunger and a lower sense of that we've eaten enough. SPEAKER 2 Really? That's setting us up to be trapped into eating too much, isn't it, at the wrong times. Like, you're just trying to get that satisfaction, and it's not coming. You just want to eat more. It's. Yeah, that's not. Not a good place, is it? SPEAKER 1 It's not a good place. And our brain gets in on the game as well, because when we're chronically under rested, there's this reward center in our brain that, you know, as functioning adults, we have this sense of delayed gratification it also wants to go on holidays in that it doesn't want to wait any longer. It says, oh, no, I deserve a reward and I deserve it now. Our ability to delay becomes inhibited. And so we're typically looking for a simple and easy fix to the solution. So when we're talking about increased appetite, we're looking for a simple reward without putting a lot of effort in, which tends to mean we don't prepare meals. We go for prepackaged things. And again, the research would suggest that they're typically crunchy and very salty. Or it's ice cream or, you know, it's high fat. Yeah, that's the food. SPEAKER 2 Yeah. That's such a bad situation, isn't it? Because lack of sleep, then that's triggering physiologically we are more susceptible to, then want to take up these foods that are not going to help us in terms of our overall well being, our overall health, any chronic conditions. And we talked about weight as well. Like all of that's. All of that is so interconnected. SPEAKER 1 It is. But like a commercial that advertises free steak knives, there's more. Our body, when we're short, rested, increases more cortisol, which is that stress hormone that we've spoken about on other programs. And so it's designed for fight or flight, but we're not doing either. And so it's building up in our body. And one of the things that cortisol does is it builds up in our body, is store excess energy on our bodies, so we call that fat and it increases our oxidative stress. We all have oxidative stress that takes place in our bodies. And this is why we're encouraged to eat foods high in antioxidants. But if we can't maintain that balance, and short resting puts the favor in increasing oxidative stress, means that we have more inflammation systemically through our body. SPEAKER 2 Hmm. Well, it just doesn't stop, does it? All of these links. You know, I think you might have said at the beginning that the graph with the obesity parallel to the short sleeping, and you think, how could that be related? But there's so many connections that even if we can't, you know, it's correlated in terms of the data. It's not necessarily causal, but you can just see how they relate to each other very easily from what you've described. SPEAKER 1 Yeah. And for all the viewers who may be experiencing diabetes themselves or a diabetic family member probably fairly well versed in the role of insulin. Okay. And so when we short sleep, consistently, our Ability for our muscles to be sensitive to insulin drops, in as little as four days, it will drop 30%. And so insulin, for those who maybe aren't so familiar with it, insulin basically unlocks the body's ability to use energy that we consume. And so if the muscles are no longer sensitive to insulin, that energy cannot be released in our daily activity. And so this is another factor of why short resting actually contributes towards weight gain. But each of these factors have other health risks. And that's why I called it more about being renewed and overall well being. SPEAKER 2 Absolutely. Like, yeah, even if you didn't have any goals with weight management or what have you, all of those things have to do with your health overall. And that side of things is so important. So it's good to be aware of what is going on as a result of something which we may not even think about, you know, rushing and got to get this done, got to do that. You stay up late, wake up early, just survive. But what is it doing to us physically? SPEAKER 1 Yeah, so as simple as getting a good night's rest can make the world of difference, Even our ability to make the best choices the next day is impaired. You know, the sleep researchers also tell us that our frontal lobe, the part of our brain that's responsible for reasoning and making those well informed choices, it becomes less able to function well. And so we make poorer choices on other aspects of our life. Not just food, but our sense of energy levels to do exercise, our options of how we choose to relax, all influenced by the frontal lobe and its ability to make the best choices for us. Because we've underestimate. SPEAKER 2 And I think we all probably could say from experience that if the decision making part of the brain isn't working so well, we tend to go by our feelings then, don't we? And so the hunger feeling that we talked about before feeling decided, wanting the quick fix, that suddenly becomes a whole lot stronger and it's hard to press against it. So, yeah, you can see the importance of looking after the frontal lobe. SPEAKER 1 Absolutely, absolutely. And there's other areas of the brain that get involved in this as well. You know, the hypothalamus, and we've spoken about this in other programs as well, and with its friends, you know, the pituitary gland and the adrenal axis, they control, you know, our regulation of hormones in our body. But there's another part that sits in our hypothalamus that's called the superchrismatic nucleus. And it's affected by light and it drives circadian Rhythms, which is basically our sleep and wake cycles. When we disrupt that part of our brain because we've stayed up too late and the sun coming up the next day is waking us up, it's readjusting our whole sleep wake cycle, which has a metabolic impact. And that predisposes us also to metabolic health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes. SPEAKER 2 Hmm, wow. So all of that. Yeah, interconnected as well. So that sort of suggests to me that it's best to have a consistency pattern. Is that correct? That's predictable. SPEAKER 1 Absolutely, absolutely. We would like to finish off on some strategies of what we can do, some quick things to implement on sleep and we can come back to that. That'd be great. I'd also like to talk about another corny approach. You know, we could. We can drink our way through drinking. SPEAKER 2 Yes, drinking the water. Tell us about this one. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, well, I mean, many of the viewers are probably aware of the recommendations that, you know, we see so much of it, particularly in Australia. You know, for women, you need to be drinking 2 liters of water a day. For men, you should be drinking three liters. You know, these are guidelines for the general population, you know, to get into the nitty gritty of the science. It does go on your body mass. And this is why typically it's suggested that females drink 2 liters of water and the males typically have a higher body mass, you know, need to drink three. But that's seasonally adjusted also. So if you. When it's summertime, doesn't matter where you're living, you need to be adding more water to your daily intake as well. And particularly if you're moving around with water work. So you live in a less humid place, but you work in a more humid environment. You need to add more fluid into your daily intake also. But 2 liters for women, 3 liters for men is kind of the starting area that will cover most of the bases. So it's a good, good target to aim for. And I know that if you're not drinking that amount of water, it can be a real challenge. And, you know, as a lifestyle coach, I come up against these challenges. Oh, I just don't like the taste of water. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, that's a common. SPEAKER 1 I'd much rather drink, you know, beer. Much rather drink cordial. Much rather drink, you know, whatever it might be. Yeah. Or another one is, I just don't want to go to the toilet that much. Like it's interrupting what I want to do. You know, when I start drinking convenience, I gotta go to the toilet. More often, you know, I understand this. And. And if we put up the picture of the car being washed, I just want to share with the viewers. This was me when I was completing my first degree. I weighed about 140kg there. And I say about. Because the scale wasn't able to register 140kg, it went to 130 and then it went back around again. So I had a little bit extra energy stored in my body then than what I do now. And I was much younger, as you may be able to tell. But most people, you know, the amount of extra weight I was carrying, I could walk down the main street of my hometown, and people I went to school with throughout primary school and high school wouldn't recognize me because of the change that took place. And I was one of these people who didn't like the taste of water. I hated drinking water. I'd much rather drink cordial, Much rather drink Milo, much rather drink soft drinks. I drink anything just about, rather than water. And the other thing was that, like a number of people I meet with as a lifestyle coach is we're unaware of what the signs of thirst are in our body, and it's often mistaken for hunger. Plenty of people think they're feeling hungry when they're really feeling thirsty, and so because they're not aware of how their body's responding or crying out for water, they just don't drink. And the last category, which was also true for me at that time in my early 20s, is that I didn't know the benefits of drinking water. You know, I thought it was an optional extra. Oh, there's plenty of water. It's good to swim in, but drinking it, not by itself. So I'd just like to go through some of the benefits and some of the consequences if we're not adequately hydrated. SPEAKER 2 Mm. SPEAKER 1 So perhaps as you reflect on the picture of me washing the car, is unwanted, undesirable weight gain. Well, that came through because I was consuming other drinks that typically had liquid sugar in them that gave more energy into my body than what I really needed. And then they deliver that energy in a form that is then challenging actually, for our bodies to process. You know, we weren't really designed for liquid sugar, so. SPEAKER 2 So your body just need to be. Stores it away as fat, doesn't it? SPEAKER 1 It's a great way to add extra weight. Yep. Liquid sugar. SPEAKER 2 Yeah. SPEAKER 1 So this unwanted weight gain can lead to metabolic syndrome, which is a precursor for type 2 diabetes. So just simply being under hydrated now sets us on a pathway for Some really serious health challenges and consequences. SPEAKER 2 And I guess it highlights that you have to drink something. Like, even though you hated the taste of water, you couldn't not drink anything. You still drank something, but you drank something that is an alternative which had all this extra stuff in it. And I think probably that's what we'd find because you. You have to drink. Like we. Our body is going to make us have something. Because your body needs the water, doesn't it, in some form? SPEAKER 1 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true, Kaysie. Yeah. But it's not just all about weight. Like, you know, it's not just about metabolic syndrome and obesity. You know, being under hydrated is linked to cardiovascular disease. It's linked to certain types of cancers and even Alzheimer's, because, you know, with Alzheimer's, there's a decreasing of brain volume. So basically, we dehydrate our brain. It's a contributing factor to developing. It's not the only factor, but it's significantly contributing factor to Alzheimer's. So when we understand that the possible consequences. Not saying everyone's under hydrated is going to get all these conditions, but we're setting ourselves up that we're more likely to. SPEAKER 2 Mm. Mm. Interesting. So I guess what would be the main things to go for in terms of. For drinking? Like, obviously, you mentioned about the. We need to recognize the thirst signals sometimes that can be hidden. So what would be the best way to tell that? SPEAKER 1 Yeah, well, look, there's a fairly well established saying in lifestyle coaching when it comes to hydration, that when you actually have that sensation that you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated. SPEAKER 2 Okay. SPEAKER 1 So if you're not aware that you need to be drinking and you're mistaking your thirst response for yeah, I need to have a snack. That's already an indicator that you're most likely dehydrated. So just the fact that that's happening, what I encourage most people to do is have a schedule and that they can work towards consuming water before they feel thirsty. So before there's a dry mouth. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, sounds good. Prevent it. Prevent it before you get that far. SPEAKER 1 Absolutely. And water played a big part in my weight loss. And, you know, for those who may be struggling with weight, I just want to make a couple of comments on that. The science, I mean, I didn't understand this when I did it. I just started drinking more water because of other choices I was making, which included exercise and included saving money. I stopped buying cordial because I wanted to save money. Instead of putting that in My water, you know, there was other factors that contributed to it, but ultimately I was consuming more water. I began to consume the amount of water that I should be. And what happens is that water acts to decrease our body's fat stores through what's called thermogenesis. So basically, as we drink the cool water, our body's got to work to warm it up. And that extra internal activity generates more energy and consumes more energy that we've stored. SPEAKER 2 Interesting. SPEAKER 1 Water also helps us, our bodies break down the fats in the food that we eat, especially the triglycerides that are most likely going to be stored as extra body tissue. And so when we've got these two powerful mechanisms that water itself does, it acts directly. And then when we add in waste elimination, you know, the fat on our bodies is inflammatory, it's inflammation. And as we calm that inflammation down, we readily able to process it. We can then deal with the waste cycle in our body. So three powerful mechanisms that directly influence our body's ability to handle and manage our weight. SPEAKER 2 And that's all connected with water and how much we have. And we need plenty of it. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, we do. SPEAKER 2 Now isn't it true that most of the biochemical processes in your body actually require aqueous environment? Like they need water to actually run through them the chemical mechanisms that occur. Is that correct? SPEAKER 1 Yeah. I've got a bit of a fun graphic of a person and water. You know, we talk about the percentage of our body that's made up of water and you know, it's like a fun fact that stores in our head for a trivia night. SPEAKER 2 Yes. SPEAKER 1 But we don't actually do anything with it on a daily basis. But you know, when we realize just what you've said, Kaysie, that you know, that reactions in our body need an aqueous or water based environment, it just makes sense why our bodies are so much composed of water and then how important it is that we continue to restock that water supply. Because we perspire, we, it comes out as in our speech. So if we're in an environment where we speak a lot in our work, you know, again, we may want to look at increasing the amount of water that we're consuming because we're using, we're giving it off as, as a vapor on a regular basis throughout the day. SPEAKER 2 Yeah. And certainly those, those biochemical processes in the body, if they don't have the water, they're not going to be operating as well, are they? So it's gonna, it's gonna affect a whole lot of things that we could probably not even measure properly. It's so complex. But we just know that the body needs lots of water to work. Well. SPEAKER 1 They do. So you asked before about some strategies. Yes, some things that people can do to implement what we've been talking about. So maybe we'll just continue with water and then we'll finish off on sleep. So the first thing I suggested earlier was to set a goal and you know, this is why it's useful to have these public health recommendations and, you know, for Australia, two liters of water a day if you're a female, three liters of water a day if you're a male, that's the goal. If you're not drinking that, that's a goal that you're setting and working towards. So what can you do to do that? So we want to talk about ways in which you can add something in fairly inconspicuously. And as an example, and particularly for those who may be wanting to better manage their weight, drink two glasses or 500 mils of water 30 minutes before your meal. So many of us have a fairly regular time in which we eat. So it's like, okay, well, if I'm going to have breakfast at 8 o', clock, at 7:30, I'm going to drink 500 mils of water. Not, not too burdensome to include that. And if we can have that 500 mils between lunch, between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner, you know, we can get in those two liters fairly easy. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, definitely. SPEAKER 1 If we don't like the flavor of water, squeeze a lemon into it or cut up a lemon, even cucumber or mint, just give it a bit of a flavour. There's no, not a lot of calories in lemon, not a lot of calories in cucumber, but it adds a little bit of a flavor to the water. And most importantly is to track your progress. You know, don't lose sight of where you've come from as you progress towards those suggested intakes of water. SPEAKER 2 Nice. And then for sleep, well, asleep again. SPEAKER 1 You know, I think it's important to recognize the journey that you've been taking and so set the plan. How am I going to get seven hours of sleep? How am I going to get nine hours of sleep? You know, you may need to go to bed a little bit earlier, like maybe one hour earlier, maybe get up. So look at realistic about what your time is available. But it is important to get off those smart devices one hour before going to bed. That blue light messes with our circadian rhythms and our ability to fall asleep. And it's also really important that if we are still drinking alcohol and soft drinks to don't drink them or any caffeinated food products and drink products after 2pm in the afternoon because it's to delay your ability to get good quality sleep when you do get to bed. And it's really important to have a ritual, an evening program that you go through every night that's going to signal to your body to relax and wind down. SPEAKER 2 Thank you for sharing those tips and I think if we apply them, we're going to be a whole lot better off to be renewed. As you mentioned, we've been talking with lifestyle coach Lorenzo Berry about sleep and hydration and their role in weight management. I hope you're able to learn something and that can help you to sleep well, drink well and be renewed. If you have questions or comments about this program, then contact us on [email protected] and remember to shape your Lifestyle as Medicine. SPEAKER A You've been listening to Your Lifestyle as Medicine, a production of 3ABN Australia television.