Do I stress my body so much that it affects my sleep?

[Saintor]

I was in a 'pseudo-maintenance mode' and gained back some weight since 2021 unfortunately.   153-155lbs was my normal range, but still higher than what I intended to do (5'10" male, medium build, 50s).

I went in a more controlled / aggressive mode since June 14th, excluding booze (rather heavy drinker here).  My average food intake according to MyFitnessPal (strictly entered and weighted when possible) is 1550 kcal.   Adding 1.5-2h of bike daily and a 30-45m should create a deficit of 3lbs a week, which I plan to do until 21st.    It is relatively easy to do and I don't feel that it is extreme.  Past that point, in a less aggressive mode, I just want to continue (no alcohol at home, this time) and my end goal is to get <12% bodyfat.

Energy is surprisingly good, mood is great;I feel driven & motivated.

My problem is sleep.   With all this new energy expenditure, I wake up ....at 4h AM, after 5.5-6h of sleep.    It used to be 6.5-7.   I have no problem getting to sleep in the evening, but can't really at 4h.  Sometimes, I can sleep in the daytime day, but not most of the days.  A consequence of this is that I have some brain fog.   What do I do at 4-5h AM?   Go for a walk!  My job has always been stressful, but not worse these days and my mood is generally better.

My carbs/sugar are in check.

I tried Melatonin and even sleep pills (the regular ones @ 25 mg diphenhydramine hydrochloride, the 50mg ones hit me like a brick) but I'd rather avoid them on a daily basis.   I tried adding ashwagandha supplements (2x 300mg), a natural stuff, it helped in some ways but not for sleep, unfortunately.

Windows are tightly closed (I suspected the birds) and it is all dark in the bedroom.  

Any suggestions, aside from eating more or exercising less?

 

 

 

 

[IgorF]

Your body is just undernourished and it is a known biological fact. Your body wakes you up to search for a food and 1h cutoff is a good balance to give the body better chance to survive but it can't do it all the time. This seems our "built-in" functionality.

The process is not a simple thing, it is a sophisticated network of signals at many levels in many areas, I could be wrong but I never heard about a working and safe way to overcome this.

Also - having 1550kkal/day even without excercises eats your body and it is probably highly unwanted. There is no way to loose only fat, lean mass is also lost and except muscles other things are not easy to get back. AFAIR at such a budget even people with longterm CR practice sitting at home and doing almost nothing are slowly drifting to lower and lower BMI and losing their muscles despite some resistance training.

So unless there is a medical condition that requires such a diet (and thus being monitored by a doctor) it would be better tune up to rather 2k/day.

IMHO offcourse.

Br,

Igor

Edited July 1, 2023 by IgorF

[5fp4]

Extreme life-style (-change) = extreme effects on both side's I could comment. 

Maybe one tip I tried for myself (successfully):

• Try to reduce all sounds available (partner next to you, tv, internet aso)
• Right temperature, clothes, bed
• My biggest effect was increasing the time before eating the last time, drank water (I mean a lot of water), exercised, aso. Best sleep effect was when this "fast" was longer then 8-10 hours
• Last hour before going to bed no active stressing as thinking/planning/watching(extreme series/movies/docus/news) and other activies which could cause my brain not to calm. I also started streching at that time to give a better balance for my muscle-regenaration.

Maybe it helps - best of luck.

 

CTPA

[Kenton]

A lot of us on CR seem to find ourselves passing out quickly at bedtime and then awakening, feeling rested, around the time you mentioned. Here's what I started doing over a decade ago: do you like meditation or consider it beneficial? When you wake up at 4am consider it an opportunity to meditate for several hours. In this way, you're not wasting time and you're in control. As a side benefit, you might, like me, find yourself unconscious for the rest of the morning after a mere five or 10 minutes.

[Saintor]

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A lot of us on CR seem to find ourselves passing out quickly at bedtime and then awakening, feeling rested, around the time you mentioned. 

Good to know.   Still struggling with this, like this AM, on again at 4h...  

 

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Also - having 1550kkal/day even without exercices eats your body and it is probably highly unwanted. There is no way to loose only fat, lean mass is also lost and except muscles other things are not easy to get back. AFAIR at such a budget even people with longterm CR practice sitting at home and doing almost nothing are slowly drifting to lower and lower BMI and losing their muscles despite some resistance training.

So unless there is a medical condition that requires such a diet (and thus being monitored by a doctor) it would be better tune up to rather 2k/day.

 It is a temporary thing and a challenge to me, until July 21st after that I just plan to be around 1500-1750 net.   It all works fine except the sleep.   In the last week, I lost 3.1 lbs which may include some lean mass.   My counter measure is to do a lot more exercise, although I should be doing more resistance training.

To me, my level of energy is astonishing these days despite the lack of sleep.  For example, yesterday I was on my bike outdoors for many hours.   I did a full  hour at 163bpm average and max 203 (and speed to match), no discomfort or excessive sweat and my body just asked for more.  In the chart, 165 is the 'recommended' max heart rate for a 55yo.  Usually, it is less than 140 average.   

I started using more supplements last week, but what I observed (lack of sleep and more energy) started 3 weeks ago, when I went into intense mode.

 

[IgorF]

 I did exactly the same things, with the same effects so I have own experience of all these "works ok", "feel great", "have a lot of energy" and so on. I am now very sure I did it wrong.

This does not work that way, this is a reliable way to get into troubles and not all of them will be possible to rollback.

Some of the lean body mass is responsible for burning the most calories, some (bones, heart) is not. Some adipose tissue also burns some but its part is lower. There is a good pop-sci book by Herman Pontzer that describes scientific understanding of how the things work and I became to the same conclusions from my own observations and a lot of reading before I faced Pontzer's book which I now recommend to curious people as a shortcut. To be honest - the same things are at the core of scientific part of CR idea, paired with mitochondrial theory of our aging and lifespan limits. But these things are a bit hidden behind a lot of theories that are not so well grounded.

If in a few words - there is something like a zero-sum game of energy until our body in the relatively strict diapason. Hypothalamus constantly monitors inside and outside signaling and orchestrates the energy channeling based on this data. If we are in the diapason, we can play CR game with it in several ways. Spending a bit more with excercises - this will leave less energy for maintenance, reproduction, immunity. Tuning down incoming calories staying in the diapason - the energy distribution effect will be not the same but of similar nature. Hypothalamus will tune the things accordingly, the weight will be constant. Less energy for potentially unwanted activity (unwanted reproductional functions with their risk of cancerous failures, immunity that looks for internal targeting in the abscence of real enemy and so on).

With excercising we can have a higher budget, for a male in 2500-3000 kcal/day. Without excercises we can tune it down to approx 2000. That is all depending on real lean mass that participates. If we will break the rules and consume more than we have as an income after some failures with maintenance hypothalamus will recognize us as being in a "scarce environment". This is not a good CR, this is starvation mode. It has its own rules of operation. Many unwanted things like problems with sleep, fogy mind, full abscence of sexual drive, constant cortisol tuneup and so on are a good sign of it. There are many others. There are also some invisible things - organs shrinkage (spleen as the first one because its function is less crucial for survival until the next potential reproduction), bone mass and quality loss, immunity functions decrease to unwanted level etc. The starvation mode is studied enough to think of it as unwanted. The longer the body will stay in it the harder will be to fix the things.

Here comes something useful from CR theory perspective. In starvation mode cells burning energy are tuned down to lower rate. This is easily distinguishable with checking resting heart rate. I sometimes dropped to bradycardia but AFAIR the majority of my measures were aroung 48-53, instead of almost 80 before I started my journey. There are individual variations but the idea is like this. When I used to live in such mode, losing the weight also at the same bad rate my resting heart rate "wanted" to return to this value all the day as long as I gave a sit for an hour. Before the experiment my random rate for day measures was in 80-90. When I stopped this "unfair cat-and-mouse" game with my hypothalamus and stabilized my weight at desired value, controlling the calories intake as a regular practice my resting heart rate in 48-53 shifted to be more often 53 and after some time, when bodie's perception of resource scarcity switched off my random day rate tuned up to 60-70. I exited starvation mode with still lower energy burning rate, that is easy to see on heart rates at different circumstances. Also blood tests known to be low in starvation/hardcoreCR mode are low for me. This generally is threated as potentially unwanted but from CR theory perspective it is exactly what is wanted.

People practising a lot of excercises can reach the same pattern - the lowest heart rate whenever possible without loosing weight but they also have a long path to this, it is not a question of several weeks. It is also not corresponding well with CR idea. From the absolutistic perspective only inactive CR is maximizing the effect because of mitochondrias problem but in the real world outside the lab environment it is risky to go that way, people are different in their risk appetite so we have people practicing both inactive and more active ways.

What was my biggest mistake in my journey? Trying to do it fast thus also pushing the limits too low. I think it could be done gradually and stopped as long as starvation mode is reached. Then to monitor and if effect is persisting (for many people it is persisting for years due to calories intake control - the ratio/gradient of incoming calories is not allowing hypothalamus to decide that there is abundance of calories and it is time to tune the engines up) just to stay in the desired range/selfperception or tuneup/down accurately.

The second my mistake was calories assessment. I thought it is true that we can live at 1700 being very active like mentioned in many texts (Okinawans, etc). Lower bodies definitely could be on lower budget, there is no magic. But the calories assessment done in many cases was not accurate. Pontzer describes a long story about his and colleagues research but I used to understand it on my own. When I was less active I was loosing my weight at 1700, then at 1900. Then I switched to more walking lifestyle (as my most lovely way of being active) and despite of tune up to 2200 and then 2400 I continued to loose weight at undesirable pace. Already having questionable stature. The answer is simple - walking (and surpisingly staying) is more energy demanding than it looks like. With my 20+k steps dayly and a short running I am slowly drifting down with approx 2800kcals now and I am burning energy a bit faster that on my descent.

There were additional failures, e.g. what is safe amount of protein but they are not worse to be mentioned in this exact topic.

That is all IMHO offcourse, also my numbers are not the best and I used them just to make it more quantitative. I wrote all this just because I easily recognize the starvation mode and hypothalamus'es hormonal circuitry weapon that makes people more alert (until they will drop even lower to somnambulic state) that looks like "all is ok", but in reality it is designed to increase our chances to get food and exit the risk zone as it threated by millions years evolved unconscious part of our brain.

 

Br,

Igor

 

 

 

Edited July 3, 2023 by IgorF

[Dean Pomerleau]

I agree with Igor, loosing 3lbs per week at 1550 calories for a very active 5'10" man weighing ~150lbs (BMI 21.5) to stressing the body too much, and likely resulting in unwanted loss of important lean mass. You may feel fine Saintor, but that doesn't mean you aren't harming yourself. 

--Dean

[Saintor]

Today, after 1945kcal intake, 2124 kcal exercise and 1699 kcal additional deficit, MFP predicts that I should weight 24lbs less in 5 weeks, that's insane!   I know that it isn't sustainable, I'll stick until July 21st, thanks for your concerns.

I really don't feel any hunger, but my body might assume differently.  Among different sites reporting this;  

https://polysleep.ca/blogs/wellness/intermittent-fasting-and-sleep

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Intense hunger increases our cortisol levels, putting the brakes on the melatonin production we need to feel sleepy and stay asleep.

A total of 2450 kcal / day deficit might qualify... cortisol time!  

In retrospect, I might also have understated one variable that I barely mentioned ...cutting the booze.   As an un-apologetic epicurean, I must admit that I have been a heavy drinker for 10 years.   I was able to log in the kcal and get to the weight I wanted up to 2021, but since then, I must have been drifting...  I was in Europe for a good part of May and I returned with a pain in my liver... *not good*.    It took 2 weeks to go away.  It is possible that my liver in healing contributes to my higher energy.   Going back to Europe again on July 21st, 'gotta be more careful...