SugarMomma’s BodyBlog

Importance of Rest 

According to Richard Giorla, author of “Raise the Barre”, the revolutionary 8-week program for total mind/body transformation, there are 3 keys to maintaining optimum health. The first two are pretty easy to guess- exercise and diet. But I bet you don’t know the last one. Rest. 

If you are like me, you are struggling to find enough hours in the day as it is. You are shaving hours of sleep off here and there to try and fit in other activities. For example, getting up an hour earlier to try and squeeze in some gym time before work. We are all guilty of this one. 

The following is an excerpt from “Raise the Barre” on the importance of rest. 

In order for your body to perform optimally each day, it needs time to repair and rest each night. You may feel relaxed, but as you sleep, your muscles are growing stronger, healing themselves from the day, particularly if you strength train. Though your eyes may be closed, your mind is not completely at rest; it is filing away learned lessons of the day. Problems are being sorted out, answers to questions that you wracked your brain for hours earlier that afternoon are being found. When you finally wake up, after a good night’s sleep, your body is rested and ready to go, your mind is sharp and buzzing with information, and a few years seem to have reversed themselves from your face. But if you want your muscles, body, and mind to adequately heal, you need to give it enough time. Though everyone’s rhythms and needs for sleep are slightly different, on average 8 hours of sleep is recommended each night. 

Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to lay their heads on a pillow and drift away for eight hours. Why? Our waking lives sometimes seem to get in the way. Late-night activities and early morning appointments leach hours from our much-needed shut-eye. Once you finally get to sleep, a partner’s snoring, a child’s nightmare, or a neighbor’s unnecessary noise can keep you wide-eyed and frustrated. Once you finally get to sleep, your alarm blares and it’s time to attempt to peel your exhausted body from your bed and hit the shower. This consistent sleep deprivation is doing more harm than merely leaving you with dark circles under your eyes and a fuzzy head. When you are tired, reaction times are significantly slowed and performance ability is reduced. 

It is important to note that sleep deprivation can make you gain weight. Even if your stomach is actually full, you may feel hungry when you are sleepy. This confusion is caused by leptin levels. When leptin levels are low, as is what happens when we don’t get enough sleep, we feel hungrier. Getting enough sleep is considered crucial to a successful weight-loss plan, and to general health and well-being. 

Have you ever wondered why you hold on to body fat and your best friend can’t keep any on?  The answer is that we all have different body types and metabolisms which effect your ability to lose weight.

There are three different types of human body in the world and they are known as “somatotypes”. The three different somatotypes are: ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs.

Ectomorphs- These people have a short upper torso with long arms and legs sticking out from it. Their shoulders and chest are typically narrow and have a long and thin muscle structure. People with the ecotomorph body type do not store very much fat on their bodies at all.

Mesomorphs - These people have a long torso with large chests and a solid musculature. People with the mesomorph body type can generally build muscle with little difficulty while not adding on very much body fat at all.

Endormorphs- These people typically have a round face sitting atop a short neck astride a torso that fans out to wide hips. Unlike ectomorophs, people with the endormorph body type can easily store quite a lot of fat on the body.

If none of these body types sound exactly like you that is because
more often than not, a person’s body will be a combination of 2 of these body type, such as an “endo-mesomorph”. This might be a person who gains lots of weight unless they work out steadily and, contrarily, if they ever stop working out, find it easy to put the weight they lost back on again.

One of the primary factors determining a person’s body type is their metabolism. Some people find it easy to burn calories while other people find they have great difficulty burning calories, even if both people have the same diet and lifestyle. It should be clear from the aforementioned definitions that someone with an endormorphic body type would have much greater difficulty burning up calories, even with lots of exercise, when compared against the other two body types. Likewise a person with an ecotomorphic body type would have great ease burning up calories, and normally without having to exert themselves much to do it.

Many people are at least cursorily aware of the existence of different body types, if not then certainly of the differences in people’s metabolisms, but most people are unaware that their metabolism can change over time as their body changes. This key point can make a crucial difference in whether or not someone loses weight and whether or not they can keep that weight off.

Working out with weights, for example, increases your metabolism.  As you hear me say constantly.  For every pound of muscle that you gain, you burn 50 extra calories each day. By the same token, however, when you lose weight, your metabolism will start to slow down.

It seems counterintuitive, yes. If an ecotomorph has a naturally skinny body and a faster metabolism, then why on earth would the metabolism of an endomorph slow down if he or she got skinny? Because our bodies function best when we are at the appropriate or “healthy weight” for our particular body type.

Statistics show that losing 10% of your body weight leads to an approximate 15% decrease in your metabolic rate. What this translates to is that the more you lose weight, the harder it gets to lose any more weight.

This explains why many people “hit a wall” (so to speak) in their weight loss program where they get to a certain weight and just can’t seem to lose any more weight beyond it: why some people just can’t shed those “last few pounds”. And it is why those crash diets like lose 30 pounds in 30 days claiming that you lose a ton of weight in just a handful of days don’t work for most people who try them. This is also why people who lose weight may initially notice having less energy rather than more.

Your body type and your metabolism are always trying to stay in balance with one another, and a change in one will invariably lead to a change in the other: an opposing changed geared to push your body back into the balance.

Losing weight slowly, a pound or two a week (and no more), is the way to lose that weight for good. And as you lose weight, expect your metabolism to slow and respond accordingly.