2 Biggest Causes of Belly Fat, Sugar Cravings, and Constant Hunger | Ep 426
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One bad night of sleep can increase your calorie intake by up to 500 calories.
Chronic stress drives fat specifically to your belly.
And both of these hijack the exact hunger hormones that control whether you feel satisfied or ravenous, even when your nutrition looks perfect on paper.
Discover how sleep deprivation tanks leptin, spikes ghrelin, and reduces GLP-1 (the hormones behind appetite control and fat loss). Learn why cortisol from chronic stress promotes visceral belly fat storage, increases insulin resistance, and amplifies cravings for calorie-dense comfort foods, plus the biological mechanisms behind "food noise" and hedonic hunger.
You'll hear 6 tips to improve sleep quality and 5 to manage stress.
Stick around for a bonus 10-minute pre-sleep protocol you can use tonight to start shifting your metabolism and hormone health in the right direction.
If you've been stuck in a fat loss plateau despite doing everything right with strength training and nutrition, this episode reveals the hidden factors that could be holding you back.
Timestamps:
0:00 – How sleep and stress sabotage fat loss
4:24 – How poor sleep crashes leptin and spikes ghrelin
8:48 – Why sleep deprivation triggers sugar cravings and overeating
12:24 – 300-500 extra calories from one bad night
15:00 – How chronic stress elevates cortisol and NPY
20:44 – Why cortisol drives belly fat storage and insulin resistance
28:18 – Appetite tools that offset poor sleep/stress
33:02 – Understanding food noise and hedonic hunger
37:15 – 6 tips to improve sleep for fat loss
43:30 – 5 tips to manage stress
49:12 – Bonus: 10-minute pre-sleep protocol you can use tonight
Sleep and stress don’t just nudge appetite; they rewire it in ways that make dieting feel impossible. One short night tanks leptin, spikes ghrelin, and suppresses GLP1, so the same meal leaves you less satisfied while cravings get louder. Add the hyperactive reward centers seen after sleep restriction and the quieter prefrontal cortex, and you’re primed to say yes to calorie-dense foods you’d normally pass. Blood sugar swings worsen as insulin sensitivity drops, so you chase quick energy and end up in a loop of spikes and crashes that feels like “weak willpower.” The truth is simple and uncomfortable: when nights get short, biology pushes you to eat more, sooner, and sweeter.
Chronic stress layers on an equally powerful hormonal script. Cortisol elevates neuropeptide Y, driving comfort-food seeking, and directs more fat to the visceral depot around your midsection, which is both stubborn and risky. It also nudges insulin resistance upward, making it harder to access stored fat and easier to store more of it. Over time, stress can blunt leptin signaling so fullness cues don’t land, even at higher body fat. Stress also disrupts sleep, compounding the appetite cascade. That’s why white-knuckle calorie cuts and marathon workouts backfire when life is chaotic: you’re stacking stressors and training your body to fight you while you diet.
Cravings, emotional eating, and the rising “food noise” many people describe are predictable outcomes of this biology. When you’re tired or tense, food cues hit harder and control drops. Advertisers know this; vivid, moving images of pizza, cookies, and burgers tap the hypersensitive reward system and prompt impulsive eating. Over time, this becomes a conditioned loop: stress → eat → relief → guilt → more stress. Some people benefit from GLP1 medications to dampen this signal; others find lighter-touch tools, like bitter-hop GLP1 activators, reduce cravings enough to regain control. But even with these aids, addressing root causes pays the biggest dividends.
Start with sleep. Aim for seven to nine hours and anchor a consistent wake time, even weekends, to tighten your circadian rhythm. Create a wind-down window: dim lights, park screens, quiet stimulation so melatonin can rise. Cut caffeine after midafternoon and keep alcohol low; it fragments REM and deep sleep and inflates next-day hunger. If late-night hunger wakes you, a small protein snack like Greek yogurt or casein can steady ghrelin. These changes shift hormones within days, often cutting snack urges and sugar cravings before lunch. Treat sleep as energy, not a luxury; it’s the lever that makes everything else easier.
Then lower stress load and reactivity. Daily low-intensity walking—especially outdoors—moderates cortisol and boosts mood. Short bouts of breath work, like box breathing, activate the vagus nerve and tilt you into a parasympathetic state you can feel in minutes. If your training volume is high while life is hectic, scale back sets or intensity temporarily; you need enough stimulus to keep muscle, not to bury your recovery. Practice flexible dieting to strip out food rules that spike stress; use ranges, include carbs strategically, and plan for foods you love so decisions feel lighter. Finally, tackle fixable stressors at the source—workload, finances, relationships—because sometimes the best “diet hack” is a cleaner calendar and a better night’s sleep.
To make it practical, try a 10-minute pre-sleep protocol tonight: shut down screens, dim lights, then do four rounds of box breathing (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) and sit quietly until lights out. It lowers cortisol in minutes and smooths sleep onset. Do it for a week and watch cravings drop, food noise quiet, and appetite feel less chaotic. When biology stops fighting you, effort starts working again.
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Philip Pape: 0:01
One bad night of sleep can increase your calorie intake the next day by up to 500 calories. Chronic stress drives fat specifically to your belly. And both of these hijack the exact hunger hormones that control whether you feel satisfied or ravenous. Today I'm gonna break down the two biggest hidden disruptors of appetite: sleep and stress. You'll learn exactly why these shift all of your hunger hormones against you and practical fixes that can break the cycle. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, Philip Pape, also the founder of the Fitness Lab app. And on the last episode, we covered the hunger hormones themselves: Graylin, Leptin, GLP1, all those other supporting players that control whether you feel full, you feel satisfied, or you're still hangry. But here's what I didn't tell you that you can understand these hormones perfectly, but still hold back or sabotage your fat loss if two specific lifestyle factors are working against you. And those, of course, are sleep and stress. And stick with me here. I know these aren't sexy, but I really want to dive in here and help you improve these because they are a big struggle for a lot of us. I'm not talking about them as vague wellness concepts. I mean the direct, measurable disruptors of these hormones that we discussed, that you can improve everything else. You can make hunger far less, which means fewer cravings, which means, you know, less belly fat storage and overconsumption, all of this stuff. Because poor sleep has a lot of negative consequences to your hormones specifically, which starts that cascade. They they tank your leptin, they spike your ghrelin, and they do this all very quickly. They do this overnight when you're deprived of sleep. Chronic stress, which we're gonna see, there's a lot of overlap between these, floods your system with a higher level of higher level of cortisol, which not only drives your cravings, but then tells your body, hey, we need to store fat around your midsection. So this is episode four of my eight-part appetite series for January. Obviously, you can listen to any of these in isolation, but if you've missed the first three, go check them out on the feed. If the previous episode was about understanding hormones, today's is about understanding why those hormones might be working against you even when things like nutrition are dialed in. Now, I'm also gonna give you a practical tip at the end that you can use tonight, literally tonight, to start shifting these hormones in your favor. Very simple tip, and I want you to stick around for that. But first, let's talk about why poor sleep might be the real reason you can't stick to your diet. Hey, this is Philip, and today's episode is sponsored by Calocurb. If you've ever been in a fat loss phase and felt like hunger was working against you, Callocurb's GLP1 activator is a game changer. Calllocurb is a natural appetite support made from amerisate, a patented bitter hops extract that activates GLP1 and other gut signals to help you feel fuller, faster. Clinical studies showed a 40% reduction in cravings and a 30% reduction in hunger within one hour. If you want to try it, go to witsandweights.com slash calocurb for 10% off your first order. The link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. And I want to start with sleep because this is probably the most underrated factor in fat loss. Here's what happens inside your body when you don't get enough sleep. And I'm not even talking about chronic sleep deprivation. Even one night of, say, four to five hours of sleep can start to shift your hunger hormones significantly. Now, if you're getting one bad night of sleep and that's it, maybe it's not an issue. If you get multiple single bad nights of sleep, even if they're not consecutive, it can definitely start to be an issue. So let me break down this cascade. First, we have leptin. Remember, leptin is your satiety hormone, tells your brain you have enough energy stored that you're feeling satisfied. When you're sleep deprived, your leptin levels decrease. So even if you're not on a diet, remember, this is a lot of these studies are on people who aren't even dieting, that they're actually eating in a surplus in some cases, not on purpose always. For example, the studies had looked at where where fat gets stored when you are sleep deprived. You know, when you're sleep deprived, it goes more to your belly, for example. So one of the things that happened is leptin goes down. Your brain interprets this as an energy deficit, even if you're eating plenty of food. So that's why I mention it, because there are things that cause your body to feel like they are under-resourced, and sleep deprivation is one of them. It's like you're putting your body in a diet without being in a diet. And who wants that, right? And so it responds by making you hungrier. And then, of course, we have ghrelin, which goes up. That's your hunger hormone, the one that goes that goes up before meals and then triggers the growling stomach that makes you want to eat, right? We talked in the last episode about a trick to sit with that between meals and create some intention and awareness. So if you missed that, go listen to the last episode and it's near the end of the episode. But sleep deprivation causes ghrelin to stay elevated for longer and spike higher than it should. So it's not that you're just hungrier, but you're hungrier earlier and more intensely. And some of you are like waking up starving, this could be part of it. You didn't have enough sleep. Of course, there's other issues if you're actually under-eating or you're not eating enough carbs or something like that. But if you're, let's say you're eating enough calories and you're still really hungry early and more intensely, it could be because of a lack of sleep. And then GLP1 decreases as well. GLP1 is this satiety powerhouse, makes you feel makes your meals feel satisfying, right? This is behind appetite, it's behind the weight loss medications. And then when you're tired, when you don't have enough sleep, your body just produces less GLP1. You have the same meal, same macro, same calories, but it doesn't fill you up the way that it should. And then insulin sensitivity drops. Okay, we we know insulin sensitivity is affected by all of these lifestyle factors, by your training, by your diet, by your sleep, by your activity. So when you're sleep deprived, your blood sugar swings become more pronounced. And so when you eat something, your blood sugar might spike higher than it otherwise would. And then you have a bigger crash in your blood sugar, especially if your meals aren't balanced, if you're not walking, things like that, right? They all exacerbate on top of themselves. And when this happens, when you have that crash, that's when you feel that craving for some quick energy, right? Sugar, carbs, anything to bring it back up. And the when all of this is going on, when you lose sleep, when you're sleep deprived, your brain's reward centers become more hyperactive. We see this in brain imaging studies, where after sleep restriction, these reward areas they light up more intensely when you see food. So if the food is like a high calorie, high sugar food, for example, again, none of this stuff is good or bad. We want to put this in context. It's not a good or bad thing, it's evolution. It's what your body is going to seek out when it feels deprived. Because again, sleep deprivation is like being in a deficit and your body's trying to get more energy. While that's happening, you're looking at this food, you're like, oh, I gotta eat that, you're drooling. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that handles decision making and impulse control, we see reduced activity there. So it's like your impulses are taking over. And this is the uncontrollable nature, the emotionally driven nature of, I shouldn't say emotionally driven. In this case, it's it's sleep deprivation, right? It's hormones. So you're hungrier, you're less satisfied by food, you're craving sugar, you're less able to say no. And studies have quantified this. There's one that found that young men restricted to four hours of sleep for just a few nights, saw an 18% increase in leptin and a 28% increase in grillia. I think I mentioned the study last time. They reported significantly increased hunger, especially for calorie-dense, carbohydrate-rich foods. And that's because there's energy in those foods. Another study showed women who slept only four hours ate 300 calories more the next day compared to when they slept nine hours. And there's been many sleep studies that look at that show just ad libitum eating, that means eating without control, increases by hundreds of calories when you're sleep deprived. Right? So is it really about willpower and decision making? Of course not. It's your biology responding to sleep deprivation the way that it's designed to, just like when you deprive it of any other source of energy. And I almost I really think we need to think of sleep itself as like uh it's just another form of energy, right? Along with your food. Now, if if sleep deprivation does this in the short term, imagine what happens when it's chronic. And that brings us to how stress amplifies all of this. Why cortisol might be the reason you're storing fat around your belly. And before I even get into this, cortisol is not a bad guy, it's not a boogeyman, it's not the root cause. It is just a symptom, right? Your cortisol is responding to what you're doing. So I do want to get that out of the way right now. There's a lot of marketing and messaging around trying to control cortisol. Well, that's just putting a band-aid on a symptom. We need to do the things up front that will allow our cortisol to be regulated properly for us. But cortisol gives us a signal of what's happening. So let's talk about stress. Okay, so cortisol is the hormone that connects stress to appetite and body composition. They're all linked because cortisol is released by your adrenal glands when you have physical or psychological stress. That includes the way you perceive stress. Even if someone else would perceive the same stressor as no big deal, if you freak out, if you respond in a way that's much more triggering because of your history, emotional baggage, context, whatever, that also appears to your body like high stress. And it follows your adrenal glands, the cortisol follows a circadian rhythm. It peaks in the morning, tapers off throughout the day. And that's normal, that's healthy, right? This is going back to our evolutionary discussion in the last episode about day-night cycles. The problem here is the chronic stress. When cortisol stays elevated for extended periods, that's when it creates this cascade effect of effects that, for our purposes, are gonna make it much, much harder to lose fat. In some cases, I don't want to say impossible, but honestly, that word comes into play because if all you're doing is cutting calories as much as possible and trying to move as much as possible and you're stressed out of your mind and not sleeping, and your metabolism therefore has tanked, none of that's gonna actually work to lose fat. You're just making everything worse, right? So, how does this work mechanistically? Well, first, cortisol increases NPY in your brain. NPY is neuropeptide Y. We mentioned it on the last episode. One of the most potent hunger-promoting signals in your hypothalamus. Okay, when this is elevated, when NPY goes up, it's not that you know, you don't just want food, you want calorie-dense, comfort food, things like sugars, fats, salts. And this is the biological basis of stress eating, right? It's it's not a deep-seated weakness that you have. It's your cortisol activating NPY makes high-calorie food feel incredibly rewarding. Second, cortisol promotes visceral fat storage. This is the belly fat piece. And I'm sorry to kind of hook you on this in the title, but we a lot of us do care about this, and a lot of us are experiencing a significant amount of belly fat accumulation that we don't like. And for many of us, it's vanity, but there's actually a health reason for it, right? Cortisol tells your body how to distribute your fat. And so if you have excess fat to store, it's gonna store it in the visceral fat around your organs. That's your midsection, your belly fat. This is the most metabolically dangerous type of fat. And one reason that chronic stress correlates so strongly with abdominal obesity. Third, cortisol increases insulin resistance. Okay, higher cortisol means your cells respond less effectively to insulin, and then you have higher circulating insulin in your bloodstream, and that promotes fat storage, makes it harder to access stored fat for energy. And it also contributes to the blood sugar sugar swings that we talked about with poor sleep. And you can't always offset that just because you are lifting weights and you're walking, right? There's or you know, moving around. Fourth, cortisol can cause some leptin resistance. People who have chronically elevated cortisol sometimes still have high leptin levels, which are supposed to tell you you're full, but then they still feel hungry. And it's just because your brain's less responsive to that signal. So even though your fat cells are saying, hey, we have enough energy, the message isn't getting through, right? And here's the connection that ties all of this together chronic stress disrupts sleep, which then amplifies this hunger hormone cascade even more. And this is why I see so many clients or members in Physique University who they hit this wall with fat loss early. Maybe they come to us with having tried different diets or fat loss approaches, maybe working with coaches on like what you're doing all the things and the macros look good, but let's say they're highly stressed at work. I mean, I definitely have a lot of clients who are just super busy go-getter hustlers, entrepreneurs, they work in the news industry, you know how stressful that is today, or they work in IT or you know, customer service or whatever. Maybe they're executives, and they're just not getting that much sleep. And of course, there's this messaging around, you know, the most busy, productive, successful people, you know, get by on five or six hours and then they're up and they're working. Guys, this is a serious impact on our health, on our long-term health. And I need to take this message myself because I often get six and a half, seven hours of sleep, or I probably should be getting eight. And, but some of you are getting six, five, you know, four and a half hours of sleep. Cortisol's elevated, leptin's not as sensitive as it should be, ghrelin is going up, and then you're like wondering why you can't stop thinking about food. Of course, you probably shouldn't be in a fat loss phase if you don't have the sleep dialed in. That goes back to the idea of being ready for fat loss and not adding too much stress to your body. But I know a lot of you aren't gonna listen, so just understanding this is actually a first step, this awareness, right? It's the hormonal environment that we're exacerbating. Now, remember, I mentioned at the top of the episode I'd give you a practical tip you can use tonight. We're still gonna get to that. We're also gonna get to specific fixes for both sleep and stress. But before we do, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Callow Curb, because we've been talking about how poor sleep and stress dysregulate your hunger hormones. They spike ghrelin, tank leptin, they make GLP1 less effective at helping you feel satisfied. And I think this is where Callow Curb comes in, that's C-A-L-O-C-U-R-B, like curb your calories. It's a 100% natural supplement featuring something called a marisate. Now, this is made from hops extract, okay, bitter hops. It activates your body's own GLP1 signaling to help you feel fuller faster. Now, here's the cool thing. This Friday, we've got Sarah Kennedy on. She's the uh CEO. And one interesting thing about Calicurb, it's actually owned by the government of New Zealand. So there's a lot of the conflict of interest type stuff isn't there as you would normally see in a, you know, a profit-based enterprise. And we really nerded out in that episode, you're gonna hear it next, about how when you consume calicurb, it's got a time-release formula, it works its way into your lower part of your intestine. And that is where the bitter hops extract triggers bitter taste receptors that increase your GOP1 almost, I don't want to say almost as much as weight loss medications, but significantly more than placebo, to where the clinical randomized controlled studies show reduction in cravings by 40% and hunger by 30%. And then that leads to consuming 18% fewer calories, and that's within an hour of taking it. You have to wait about an hour so it gets through your system, but then you're good to go and it lasts about four to six hours. There are no side effects, no stimulants, you don't need a prescription. What I love about call curb is it works with your biology, it actually upregulates your hormones. So it kind of offsets some of this stuff that's going on. Even if you do have a little bit of stress and poor sleep, even though I don't, you know, I want you to work on those, but those are pushing your hunger hormones and the hormones in the wrong direction, calllocurb kind of pushes them back. In fact, some people take the GLP1 meds at a lower dose along with call curb or use it to get off of GLP1s. So for those of you who are just trying to control your appetite a little more effectively, I think this is a great tool. I'm using it myself in an upcoming fat loss phase, recommending it to clients and also going to be using it during rapid fat loss. So go to wits and weights.com slash calllocurb and use my code Wits and Weights for 10% off. It actually should automatically apply if you go to that link in the show notes. Witsandweights.com slash callocurb. Okay, let's get a bit deeper into what is happening when you experience intense cravings. We're gonna talk about cravings, emotional eating, food noise. All right, these are the cravings that come out of nowhere. They smack you in the face, they smack you in the brain, in your stomach, they feel impossible to resist. And both sleep deprivation and chronic stress are potentially behind these without even having to go further. This is where I want you to do some self-diagnosis. Because sleep deprivation, chronic stress amplify hedonic hunger. That is the drive to eat for pleasure and reward, not because you physically actually need energy. It's it's the feeling of wanting food desperately, even when you're not actually hungry, almost uncontrollably. Like I'm just gonna go let my body take me, and I'm gonna grab the ice cream or grab the chips or tortillas or whatever. So here's the mechanism of how that works. When you're tired or stressed, your brain's award system becomes hypersensitive to food cues, right? If you see a commercial for pizza, and and I always tell my daughters, like, look at how they market food on visual ads, right? Commercials and ads. The food's always in motion, right? The pizza is bubbling and melting over. You know, the cookies are have the gooey chocolate being broken apart, the burger, it's like the piece of the burger falling one at a time as they layer it up. And I'm sorry if you're listening to this and I'm triggering you right now, but I think it's a visceral way to think about how food is visceral. And even the memory of a food you enjoyed makes these signals, it triggers these signals. And then at the same time, the logical part of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, which normally helps you pause, take a breath, make rational decisions, it is now suppressed because of the sleep deprivation. This is again, this is your body saying, we're gonna do everything we can to get you to eat. So you have this double problem. You have a higher reward drive and you have reduced self-control. And for some people, it's a lot worse than others. And for many of you, it's like almost programmed in from years and years of dieting, hence why the GLP1 meds have become so powerful for some people to reduce this. So this is why you can't stop at just one cookie, right? It's your brain literally operating in a state where high calorie food feels more rewarding and your ability to regulate intake is compromised. And so this creates a conditioned loop over. Over time. Stress leads to eating. It provides temporary relief, right? It fills the void for you, the relief, then it reinforces the behavior because it's a reward. But then often comes the shame or the guilt that creates more stress, which then drives more eating. And that is the cycle of emotional eating. And it's maintained by this hormonal environment that we've been discussing this whole time. Now, the term food noise, I think is has become, I don't know if it was like one of the words of the year for 2025, but it's become really popular, especially with the rise of the GLP1 meds. And it's a legitimate thing that refers to constant mental chatter about food. You know, thinking about what you're going to eat next, planning meals, fantasizing about certain foods. For people who are sleep deprived or chronically stressed or both, the food noise is amplified. Your brains are literally spending more mental bandwidth on food because the hormonal signals are telling them to prioritize eating, which is why, just as an aside, some people do need GLP1 medications. Absolutely, because it's just so massive of a signal. No matter what they do, even if they try to sleep better and lift weights and everything, it's there and they need that. Then there's solutions in between, like Calicurb that I just talked about. I'm a huge fan of that tool, by the way. There's actually a new study, a blind-controlled study, that I can't share the results of that I spoke with Sarah about, where the results are actually surprisingly good in terms of weight loss and maintaining weight loss. So any tool you can use to reduce food noise that helps you get over that hump, I'm a fan of in the toolbox. Okay. The good news is, even despite those, or in addition to those tools, you can help quiet that noise by addressing root causes if they're related to sleep and stress. That's why I think today's episode is so powerful. So this is the actionable part, okay? I'm gonna give you some specific strategies for both that can shift the hormonal environment. All right. And I want you to just start with the biggest low-hanging fruit based on what you know about yourself. So for sleep, I'm gonna give you six tips. I know there's gonna be a lot in here, okay? But hopefully you can you can go back to the timestamp and re-listen to this if needed. For sleep, first, pure quantity of sleep is a problem for many of you. That seven to nine hours of sleep, I know you've heard this before, but if you're getting six and wondering why you have problems with snacking, emotional eating, everything, that that could be the simple answer. And I say simple, easier said than done, right? But an extra one or two hours, don't think of it as this luxury that you can't possibly have. Think of it as like the solution to many of your ills. Okay. And it's an I'll say quote unquote easy solution compared to lots of other possibilities. So that's the first one. Second, I want you to have a consistent wake time. So this hits on circadian rhythm and consistency that I've touched on in the episode series. And the wake time is actually more important than the consistent bedtime, believe it or not, because your circadian rhythm anchors to when you wake up. So pick a wake time that you can maintain all seven days of the week, including weekends. I know that sounds weird, disruptive. Some of you like to, you know, you get up at 5:30 on the weekdays and you like to sleep until eight on the weekends. Just try it for me. Try the same time. So ideally, you combine this with number one, and you kind of shift and add a half hour, an hour to your wake time on the weekdays, and then maybe come back a little on the weekends and make them match within, say, 30 minutes. And then your body will start naturally getting tired at the right time in the evening. That's the goal here. Third, I want you to create a wind down routine. This can be a lot of different things, and we're gonna touch on something at the end of the episode that's just that can that can apply to anybody and that's super simple because I think with this gets kind of this gets confusing because people are like, what the heck do I do? It seems like a big change. But dimming the lights, you know, an hour before bed, not scrolling on your phone, it's not just about the blue light, it's also the stimulation, right? Telling your brain it's time to downregulate, lower light exposure to trigger your melatonin, all of that. Okay, so having some sort of wind-down routine with the lights and the stimulation. Four, I want you to limit caffeine after 2 p.m. Okay. This is an easy one as well. I know if you love coffee, it doesn't sound easy, but look, there's decaf coffee, there's brewed hot, what do you call it? Brood chocolate. There's like different ways you can still have that oral fixation in the hot beverage. There's tea, of course, you know, all by British and New Zealand, Australian folks, Canadian who are into you know, afternoon tea, there's tea, but go with decaf, right? Because caffeine has a big half-life. It's like five or six hours. So even if you drink as if you stop drinking at 3 p.m., that's still 50% active at 9 p.m. And of course, if you're more sensitive to caffeine, you want to cut it off even earlier. So if you don't drink as much caffeine, it's even more important you stop earlier before 2 p.m. Number five is please watch the alcohol. I would recommend you limit as much as possible, if not abstain from alcohol as much as possible, because there's really no plot positive to alcohol in any way, shape, or form. But again, we're not about restriction and trying to eliminate everything here. It's got to work for you and be sustainable. Alcohol, a lot of people think it helps them fall asleep, but it actually fragments your sleep architecture. Anybody who tracks your, you know, your deep in REM sleep, it reduces those. And I mean, I've seen this. I don't, I almost never drink. I might have a drink once a month. And when I do, if it's late enough, I go to sleep. Everything's off according to my aura ring. I get way less deep in REM sleep. That's anecdotal, I get it, but the evidence also supports this. And that's even just a couple simple drink drinks in the evening, like a couple beers or whatever. So watch the alcohol if you care about good sleep. And then number six, if hunger is keeping you up, think about a pre-meal bed that has some protein, like Greek yogurt or like a casein protein shake that will kind of even out the ghrelin spikes and then not disrupt your sleep due to hunger. Okay. I would say that's a little more of a hack because it could suggest other problems throughout the day. And of course, if you're in a calorie deficit, that could be part of it, but this could be helpful. So those are my six tips for sleep. Now, for stress, I have five tips. I know, again, I know it's a lot. I I hope this is not too much, but maybe you can grab one of these and run with it. For stress, first, I want you to incorporate daily low intensity activity. Just walking is a game changer, especially outside in natural light with vitamin D. This will modulate your cortisol. And we're only talking 10, 15, 20 minutes, one time at least. Now, I obviously encourage lots of walking and walking after meals and getting certain step counts, but this is really just about stress management. Sunlight exposure in the morning also helps regulate your circadian rhythm. In fact, I love training in the morning and I love sunlight exposure in the morning. And a lot of those help with your sleep later on and your stress, of course. Number two is try breath work. Okay. I'm not a meditator, but I do occasionally use breath work. And now we have apps that can help you out with it, even just for five minutes, for two minutes, right? Of deep breathing, a simple box breathing practice. This is where you're gonna activate your vagal nerve, and that shifts your nervous system from sympathetic, fight or flight, to parasympathetic, which is rest and digest. And for some, doing this just once a day, they report significant improvements in their overall ability to handle stress. Number three, I want you to watch your training volume. Okay. A lot of you love to train. I know, I do too, but evaluate your volume. Okay. Overtraining could be amplifying your cortisol. Like if you're pushing really hard in the gym, but then you're dealing with high stress in life and poor sleep, and now you're aggressively dieting as well. You're kind of stacking one stressor on top of another. And training volume is kind of a big nebulous term because you know you need enough to hold on to your muscle, but you don't need nearly as much as you think. And especially if you're doing this higher rep endurance style training for sure, scaling that back while addressing sleep and stress can accelerate the whole thing that you're trying to do here in a good way, right? So look at volume. Number four is if you're not already doing this, practicing flexible dieting rather than rigid dieting is going to help tremendously with the psychological stress around food. Every time I talk to a client or physique university member or somebody who started using my app, and they're like, you know, I've always been low carb, but I understand from listening to you or talking to you, like it's okay to eat carbs, and carbs are good for you. Carbs help with muscle, with recovery, with everything else. So I'm gonna give it a shot. And they start to change that mindset, and they realize that their calories can be flexible. It doesn't have to be nail on exactly this many calories or this much protein. It helps with cortisol and reducing those negative associations with eating. Because now you're like, okay, I really can eat anything I want. It's more of having structure and having ranges and allowing for variability, including foods I enjoy. Then I don't have all that stress and decision-making fatigue, right? So don't discount the power of that flexibility. If you're listening and that's the thing for you, that you're still stuck in the carbs are bad or this is bad, that can be a big lever for you that really doesn't take. I mean, if anything, it's it's a fun thing to start incorporating more foods, in my opinion. And then number five for stress is to address the source of the stress. Okay. Again, some of you are gonna be able to do this, some not. It depends on your situation. But if there's a life stressor that you can actually change or mitigate a situation at work where, you know, a relationship issue where you have to have a conversation with your spouse or loved one or friend, a financial concern in your life where it's it's time to sit down and figure out what to do about that or get an advisor or whatever, consider whether working on that is the biggest choice for your fitness right now. Isn't that interesting, right? Because it's all connected. If trying to get a different job or a different role at work or out of like an oppressive manager or whatever, is the thing that's gonna have benefits for your sleep and stress and appetite, and therefore your body composition, and therefore how you feel, and your confidence and your you know physical appearance and all that, sometimes the best diet intervention is actually reducing your stress or eliminating a source of stress in your life. So we talked about a lot today. I want to tie this all together with the bigger picture. If you've been struggling with constant hunger, stubborn belly fat, sugar cravings, and you're doing the other things right, I do want you to look at sleep and stress. They are not just minor factors. I would put them at the top for many of you. At the top, even above strength training, believe it or not. They are primary regulators of the hormones that control your appetite, right? So they affect your psychology and also physiology when it comes to fat loss. But it's more than about fat loss. I know we taught we we connect this to fat loss, but it's really everything. It's your health, it's how you feel, it's the upward spiraling that you get once you start to fix these, where the other things get easier. That's where the hormones are tied in. And it's not that your hormones, like you need to get hormone labs and fix your hormones and get hormone therapy. Maybe you do, but that's beside the point. It's the hormones are symptoms telling you what's going on. The good news is fixing these for lots of you listening is often the low-hanging fruit, right? Many, many of the people I work with hit breakthroughs and it has nothing to do with macros or cardio or training. It's they got one more hour to sleep every night. Or they started box breathing. Seriously. Okay, your body responds to signals that you have some significant control over. I want you to remember that. Think like the stoic philosophers of ancient times, right? The Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, who, you know, ask the question, not what can't I control, but what can I, what can I change? Okay, what can you do based on what we talked about today? So you can quiet that, those cravings and that food noise and make some progress. The encouraging thing is that they happen fast. They happen fast. Just sleep a couple good nights in a row. And I believe you're gonna notice the difference in your biofeedback and your appetite and your cravings. Right? Implement some stress management practice we talked about today for a week or two and watch how it affects your relationship with food. All right, so before we wrap up, I did promise you a specific tip that you can use tonight. Something simple that addresses both sleep and stress simultaneously. Stick around because I'm gonna give you that tip in just a second. Hey, this is Philip. And a quick reminder about today's sponsor, Calocurb. If hunger has been the hardest part of your fat loss phase, even when everything else is dialed in, check out CaloCurb. It's a natural GLP1 activating supplement with clinical data showing 40% fewer cravings and 30% less hunger within one hour, leading to 18% fewer calories, so you can stick to your fat loss plan. Go to witsandweights.com slash callowcurb for 10% off your first order. Link is in the show notes. That's witsandweights.com slash calocurb. All right, here is that tip I promised you. It is called the 10 minute pre-sleep protocol. Because we talked about having a wind-down routine, we talked about all this other stuff for sleep. But here's a very tactical thing to do. 10 minutes before you want to be in bed, that's it. 10 minutes, do this. Turn off all screens, dim the lights in your room as much as possible, sit or lie down somewhere comfortable, and that could be right in your bed, and do four rounds of box breathing. Box breathing simple. You breathe in for four seconds, you hold for four, you breathe out for four seconds, and you hold for four. That's it. Four in, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Then do four rounds. This is gonna take three minutes. Then just sit or lie there quietly for the rest of the time. You could do some light stretching if you want, but for many of you, just sit there and lie down. You're in the dim lights, which trigger your melatonin. They are preparing your body. The box breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system. That very acutely in the moment lowers your cortisol. In the screen free time, it gets rid of the stimulation that keeps your brain in that alert mode, right? So you're simultaneously improving the onset of sleep, reducing your stress, setting up your hormones for a better night. Do this consistently for just one week. Notice how your appetite and cravings shift the very next day. That's it. I hope that helped. I want you to use it tonight. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the path to fat loss is not always about eating less or training more. Sometimes it's about sleeping better and stressing you less. This is Philip Pape, and we'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.
