31 Days of Lessons Learned: Day One:
Getting a good night’s sleep is important
I’m going to ease myself into this year’s blog challenge. Last year, I blogged about Halloween all month, which is extremely easy for me given the fact that I’m such a huge fan of the Halloween season. This year though, I’m going to be a bit more introspective. Sure, my blog site traffic may not be as high this time, but I’ll be giving you some quality content.
Before I get into the really deep lessons, I’m going to start off with a lesson I learned today actually.
As part of my ongoing work on weight loss and improving myself, I just started taking a 12 week class from the University of Michigan’s MHealthy Department. I’m in their Weight Management Program that breaks classes down between nutrition, fitness, and psychology. It’s an amazing course so far and I would recommend it to anyone in the Ann Arbor area who wants to work on these issues.
So, tonight we spoke about several things, but the one thing that stood out to me the most involved sleep and its affect on gaining weight.
Cooper and I sleeping back in his puppy years.
Since college, I’ve maintained that as long as I get four hours of sleep all night, I’d be just fine…and for the most part I have been. That mantra has given me twenty hours of awake time a day, which allows me some “me” time after everyone goes to sleep, which I use to either watch movies that only I care about, play video games, play on the computer, or read. Sometimes, I actually even get some writing done.
These late nights helped in college because of my heavy course load and it helped when Cooper was a puppy because we had a lot of issues with him when he was younger that required us to let him out multiple times a night. Now, with a Toddler running around, it gives me some decompression time.
From day one though, my wife hasn’t been a fan of my late nights and kept telling me that it was bad for me and that it was going to affect me. Still, I resisted. That “me” time is important to me. I think it’s part of my only-childness.
Well, tonight in my MHealthy class, I learned the negative affects getting four or less hours of sleep a night can have on you…especially as they relate to weight gain. As it turns out, if you are in that group of people who have that kind of sleep schedule, you are most likely to gain weight, most likely to have the hardest time keeping weight off, and most likely to carry all your weight in your abdominal area (plus a whole bunch of other bummer mental, physical, and physiological things too).
Strike One.
Strike Two.
Strike Three.
My wife doesn’t hear it very often, but I am officially admitting I was wrong and she was right. While I’m not going to change overnight and I may still have the occasional late night, today I learned I need to pay more attention to my sleep schedule.
Lily takes a shoulder snooze.
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