Sleep is Critical for Weight Loss

30 years ago I used have a patient name Ron who ran marathons for fun. We lived in a small little town in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Ron was always a little bit chunky. I thought this was odd because he had run between 15 and 20 marathons in the time that I knew him. Ron was especially colorful because about an eighth of a mile before he would finish his marathon, he would stop and reach down into his athletic supporter or sock and grab a pack of cigarettes and light one and then jog it on in and finish the race where they would take his picture. He had pictures on the wall at his home with all of these smoking finishes.

Ron was never accused of being thin. He never really even breathed deeply while he ran and therefore never really lost any weight. He was Polish by descent so he was stocky and strong. One day I asked him why he ran. He said he enjoyed how it helped his mind relax from a stressful job with the government.

Oddly enough, one day Ron came in because he was having pain in his hips and knees and lower back. I asked him why he doesn’t just go ahead and give up on the marathon running and start increasing his flexibility and deeper breathing with yoga. He thought that was an odd question but that he would go home and think about it. The next week he bought a video about yoga. I think he called it ‘yoga for dummies’.

At his next appointment he stated that he couldn’t believe how tired he was ‘from just stretching’ and how he lacked the ability to take a deep breath even after all that running. He slowly started incorporating more yoga in his life and working harder and harder at breathing. I told him that the number one way that we detoxifying our lives is actually by breathing out.

70% of how we detoxify is through exhalation. 20% is through the skin and 10% through the bowel and bladder.

Even though he was an engineer, he had trouble believing that simply breathing deeply was one of the major keys to losing weight given that he had been running marathons for so long and yet he was not what anyone would consider to be thin or even really in shape to look at him. The more he began to do the easy gentle poses of the yoga for dummies, the better he started to feel and the more flexible he became.

What he found to be really amazing was that when he weighed himself in the mornings, he would lose weight from what the scale said the night before. I told him that once you really get into a very deep sleep, you begin to breathe very deeply creating a cleansing detoxifying action in his body. This is where weight loss happens. Ron lost about 40 pounds by doing just yoga, decreasing his carbohydrates and concentrating on his deep breathing. He stated that after we had talked about breathing and how it is such an important component in detoxification, he would look at his daughter and watch her breathe while she was asleep at night. He noticed that his little girl would take deep breaths while she was asleep.

See, that’s when we all repair our bodies and because we're not taking any food in, especially carbohydrates, fat is what we use for fuel to burn all night long while the repair and detoxification process is occurring.

Skinny Up!^® incorporates the power of sleep in our protocol. We incorporate the idea that you don’t stress your body into losing weight and reshaping itself, but rather, encouraging the body into ‘resting ‘ its way into weight loss using the power of detoxification and intermittent fasting. By doing this, the body can use the fasting period to digest our diseases and our inflammation and allow detoxification, healing and weight loss to occur instead of simply digesting food constantly. Sleep heals. Fat is used as a fuel during sleep. You are lighter in the morning because you haven’t eaten and your inflammation is reduced.

Consider the ease of the Skinny Up!^® protocol where you’ll lose. 5 to 2 pounds of weight per day on average. Cutting-edge products with cutting-edge results.

-Dr. K. Venekamp, Skinny Up!^® Team Member