Your Gut Will Make You Sleep Stronger

It’s not the girth of your belly that can slap some wakefulness on your sleep quality. Though a big belly can make it tough to roll over in your bed. It’s the contents of that belly that may have an unexpected role in your ability to get good sleep. By contents we don’t mean food. Instead, it’s the quality of your gut microbiome that will determine how well rested you feel when your alarm clocks seers across your ears in the morning. Sleep and obesity have a weird relationship. Logically, the more calories you eat the more energy you should have, but that’s not the case. The more you eat, the lazier you get. Conversely, the less you sleep, the more you want to eat the following day. The more you eat. The more you weigh. The less you sleep. Keeping up? Yep, sleep and your bodyweight live in a tinfoil nutjob upside-down world. Fortunately, new research has stepped in to shed some light onto what’s going on with your stomach. It’s the kind of pillow talk that may completely transform your nighttime routine and possibly the shape of your body.

LA-LA Land

Cheese will give you nightmares. Honey will get you to sleep faster. Hot milk will fight the insomnia. Food and sleep go together like Netflix and chill. New research in the journal PLOS ONE found that it’s your gut microbiome that plays a serious role in your sleep quality. People with a more diverse microbiome had increased sleep efficiency, improved total sleep time and even heighted your immune system and cognition. Wow! That’s about as close to body, mind, and soul solution as you can get. They suggest that by improving the diversity of your gut microbiome, you can seriously improve your sleep quality. If you improve your sleep quality, you feel more energized. You’re better primed to train the next day. You’re less inclined to make questionable food choices. You’re mentally a step ahead of yourself. The cascade of benefits is there for the taking. All you must do is put the right things in your insides so you can be a boss of your pillow time.

Gut Feelings In Action

Usually, a diet tells you what not to eat. Scratch that idea because here’s what you need to eat because there are certain foods that offer your internal microbiome a serious health kick. Rule number on is to eat lots of different foods. Don’t stick with the same tired veggies that you’ve eaten for years. Branch out. Get innovative and aim to eat something you normally wouldn’t consider at food. Try shopping at Asian grocery stores, or at a new store, to give yourself bigger choices that you’d normally skip. The prescription is simple: eat lots of fruits, vegetables and legumes. Easy. Throw in some fermented foods when you can, like kombucha, kimchi and kefir. Try to go for whole grains where possible and if you are prone to baking then switch up your flours from time to time. So, if you like pancakes then try spelt flour or almond flour. If they’re not as sweet then get a low-calorie syrup to make it more palatable, such as SINFIT’s blueberry syrup that’s got no sugar. Be adaptable. Just try to divert your tastebuds from the usual stuff you’re always eating, and you’ll soon see improvements in your sleep patterns and quality. Do it for a month and you’ll soon sleep so hard that you need a nap just from sleeping so deeply.

GUT HEALTH REFERENCE:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6779243/

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash.