Hi, and welcome back to Medical Minutes.
Today I’m going to talk about one of my favorite topics: the three most important parts of weight loss. Number one is sleep, number two is diet, and number three is exercise.
So, here they are. Diet, exercise, and sleep.
Let me tell you a story. When I first figured this out, it was many years ago, and it was by accident when we figured it out. I had a patient who worked with a company based in Europe. And so, he had weird conference calls at all hours of the night. 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, and so forth. So when he was dieting, exercising, and sleeping, he was losing weight just fine. But with these conference calls, sleep went away, and what we noticed was, interestingly enough, he at least maintained his weight when he was doing diet and exercise.
There were other times when his conference calls were just fine. He didn’t have them for a while, so his sleep was fine. He still exercised, and his diet went away. And when his diet went away, he still maintained.
Throughout the years, time and time again, with many, many patients, I have realized that when we’re doing all three of these, diet, exercise, and sleep, we tend to be losing weight. When we’re doing any two of them… And it really probably doesn’t even matter which two. We can take sleep away, and still exercise and diet. We can take diet away, and still exercise and sleep. Or we can take exercise away, and still diet and sleep. Any two of them, we are maintaining weight.
If we take two of them away, leaving only one, we’re probably starting to gain weight. So, if we take diet and sleep away, we’re only exercising, we probably are gaining, but rather slow. If we take exercise and sleep away, and just dieting, we could be maintaining to gaining slow. Or vice versa, just sleeping.
But then I find there’s times when stress comes and all three of them go away. And when all three of them go away, we tend to gain weight, and we tend to gain weight quickly.
In future episodes, I will talk about different diets, I will talk about regular exercise, and obviously seven hours of sleep.
Have a great day.