How diet Affects sleep?

Does diet regulate your sleep or does sleep  regulate your diet?




Low carb high fat diet had a significant increase in n rem sleep. What does n rem mean, that is non-rem sleep, that is the deep delta wave sleep, that's the type of sleep where  you burn most of your fat it's a type of sleep that you wake up and you feel rejuvenated physically. Now with a high carb low fat diet you're going to be more deficient in zinc.




Zinc and sleep

Zinc does so many things  it's involved in over 300 different pathways but zinc has an unexpected sleep benefit. Typically, when you think of a zinc deficiency you think of a child not growing very fast or someone having low testosterone or they can't taste or smell or they have poor wound healing or a poor immune system, or even they may develop  an ulcer, but one huge symptom for a lack of zinc is poor sleep.

 So zinc has a major influence over the central nervous system. In fact it's the second most abundant trace mineral in your brain. It's involved in neurotransmitters which are those hormone communications that travel through the  nervous system. It's also essential for making adenosine. Now what is adenosine. Adenosine is that molecule that gradually builds up through the day and creates sleep pressure. It's that compound that controls pressure that pushes you into the deep sleep and all night long when you're sleeping adenosine breaks down and then you become awake.




Also caffeine blocks adenosine and that's why caffeine makes you more awake, but zinc will help you build up more adenosine which is sleep pressure. Zinc is also involved in making dopamine. It's also involved in making serotonin which then turns into melatonin the sleep hormone.  

Also zinc is involved in certain biochemical pathways involving glutamate which has a profound effect on deep sleep. So zinc is what is called a sleep modulator. It helps control sleep.

Now anytime you take zinc i also recommend  you take it with copper in a certain ratio, so for every eight to ten milligrams of zinc you want  to take point five to one milligrams of copper. And 0.5 milligrams of copper is 500 micrograms. So roughly you'd want 10 times more zinc than you do copper and i also recommend taking that zinc copper and a blend of trace minerals. 




Now out  of  all the food that you can eat oysters have the  highest amount of zinc and also oysters are loaded with taurine. Which is not only good for increasing  your physical performance but it's also good for your sleep cycles, and oysters also have  something called gaba receptor agonist. Now what is that, that is something that activates gaba, and gaba is all about calming the nervous system down, helping you sleep. And it's been found that people with shorter amount of sleep have significantly less zinc than those people who can sleep longer. And lastly the blood-brain barrier has low permeability for zinc. So if you're very deficient in zinc, you're just not going to sleep, so it really helps to beef up no pun intended your zinc supply. So there's many things you can do for sleep and  zinc is definitely one thing to add to the list.




In short, zinc can greatly influence certain parts of  the brain that control sleep and so if you have a sleeping problem taking zinc before you go to bed very good idea and so with a low carb high fat diet, you're not going to be as deficient in zinc, and that's going to help you sleep as well as decrease your hunger but with a high carb low fat diet you're  going to be hungry all the time.  

How sleep affects the diet

if you have poor sleep both in quality and quantity you will definitely notice an increase in the desire to eat that means if you don't sleep you're going to be hungrier. So repeat poor sleep equals more hunger.  There's also one study on poor rem sleep, that usually happens in the second  half of the night where there's superficial sleep.




What happens when you have poor rem sleep is you increase the absorption of glucose, which is going to spike your blood sugars, which is going to affect your insulin, and that's going to make you hungry too. And not to mention when you're not sleeping well your cortisol is going to go up, and cortisol will release more glucose, it'll increase your blood sugars, increase insulin and you're going to have a greater appetite and with higher levels of insulin they're going to have a heck of a time trying to lose weight. Many people struggling with weight when they were focusing on exercising and trying to eat less calories, it wasn't until they got the high quality sleep, that helped them lose weight but when you put on the ketogenic diet that right there calms the sympathetic nervous system down. It helps lower cortisol, it helps increases their sleep, it helps them lose more weight, people are more satisfied. So it's much easier to lose weight if you're on the ketogenic diet.




Ketogenic diet for beginners

First we discuss, what is a ketone?

 A ketone is not a fat, it's not a carbohydrate, it's not a protein, it's kind of a combination, or it has characteristics of both a fat and a carbohydrate. But it's not either it comes from fat but a ketone is an alternative fuel source. And the way that you get ketones is you simply lower your carbohydrates in your diet or you reduce the frequency of eating and this is why a low carb diet is recommend with in a minute fasting and that way you can maximize your ability to make ketones.




Ketones have many advantages versus regular glucose fuel.

•Number one and it will increase your oxygen in your body.

•Number two it increases your energy.

•Number 3 it supports the brain.

In fact your brain prefers ketones over glucose. Same thing with the heart. If your heart is damaged or your brain is damaged ketones are the answer and they can bypass the mechanical damage pathways and feed the tissues directly, most of the body tissues can run in ketones but some parts need glucose and this is the confusion that people have. They think, they need to consume glucose to get glucose, no there's something called gluconeogenesis , your body can make glucose if it needs it from fat ketones proteins. You don't need to consume carbohydrates to get glucose. Now it does take time to turn the fat into ketones,  it's going to take between 3 to 5 days, it all depends on how damaged insulin is in your body how damaged your pancreas is. If you are a pre-diabetic or if you are a diabetic, if you have insulin or is instance it's going to take longer and longer to adapt but by lowering the carbs and going in in a minute fasting. you'll get there a lot faster that explains how to get in ketosis, you lower the carb and you lower the frequency of eating.

Benefits of doing that

Now why would you want to do ketosis, what is the big benefit of doing that, well you're going to lower insulin and most people have high insulin. Rarely, does your doctor ever test you for insulin, they'll test you for glucose but not insulin. If they did, they probably would find higher levels of insulin. The tests that you would want to do is called   Homa- ir and that will pick this up too much insulin causes insulin resistance.




Insulin resistance is behind pre-diabetes, insulin resistance is behind metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure a fat in the gut area, and pre-diabetes leads to diabetes. so in reality diabetes stems from high levels of insulin at certain point and so keto and an intermittent fasting will lower insulin. And that is the big benefit of doing this. There's a lot of other benefits too, you can reduce fat in your liver, you can improve your cognitive performance, you can improve your mood, you can help decrease blood pressure, decrease inflammation, improve your energy and decrease your  belly fat. But the real big benefit that allows you to do this eating plan, is your hunger goes away. Without being hungry all the time, it makes it really easy to do long-term as a healthy lifestyle.




Intermittent Fasting

And there's even an additional benefit if you're doing intermittent fasting. Basically what this is, it's a recycling of garbage in your tissue, so all the damaged protein, the protein that your body doesn't need, it's clogging everything up. Guess what, your body will recycle that and turn that into new amino acids.

 •To do this, you have to fast at least for 18 hours so the combination of keto and intermittent fasting work very nicely together, because if you just do keto without an intermittent fasting and your metabolism is slow. You may not achieve your weight loss goal or your other goals. Because it would take a very long time and sometimes it's not going to work. Why, because the frequency of eating in general will trigger insulin, so the frequency of eating is actually very important in relationship to you lowering insulin. All right then you have this concept of a healthy keto plan versus dirty keto. Of course, we recommend the healthy keto and this basically is higher quality ingredients grass-fed, pasture-raised versus conventional type foods.




Healthy keto Versus Dirty Keto

With healthy keto you're focused on nutrient-dense foods, with dirty Keto you're really just focused on keeping your carbs low.

When you do healthy keto you end up looking a lot better than doing their dirty keto.

So, the rule of thumb is don't eat unless you have hunger, okay unless you have the sensation of being hungry.

When you're doing the healthy version of keto and you're doing enough leafy greens and vegetables, and you're doing enough healthy fats and you're improving insulin resistance, you're not only going to be full but you're going to be satisfied.




•Now if you look at the pie chart here we have about 5 percent carbs of  your total calories and then 5 percent vegetables, which by the way actually adds up to a lot, because if you look at the carbohydrates and vegetables you minus the fiber giving the net carb. It doesn't come out to a lot of calories, so if we look at the total carbs, which would include like berries, hummus, nuts and seeds. There's a little bit of carbs in those. And you combine the vegetables that's like 10% , then we have 20% protein, and then we have 70% fat.

Now the fat looks like a lot but realize, fat is basically double the calories of other macronutrients.

But if we actually look at an actual with your food on the plate. if you just look at it.




Like this, to keep it really simple half of plate vegetables, okay a quater would be protein and quarter bea fat. But because protein and fat usually come together, that's going to be pretty much half your plate. that's what it should look like. The benefit of the vegetables are the vitamin C and minerals other nutrients and phytonutrients.




Overview Ketogenic Diet

The simple overview of all the most important things. So let's just put it all together.

Ideally when you wake up in the morning, if you keep your carbs low, you're not going to be hungry, so you want to skip breakfast and push it forward to the point where your breakfast now becomes your lunch. So don't eat in the morning, you can do coffee or tea. So ideally, your first meal would be at lunch and then your second meal would be a dinner. So you're doing two meals a day. If you keep this within a six-hour window, that will give you an 18 hour fast. Now what's really magical about 18 hours is that's, when the autophagy starts, you start getting some really cool benefits. The way that you're going to avoid snacking between the meals is you're going to add a little more fat with lunch and dinner to be able to go longer.

Then as you start doing it and becoming more adapted, you can kind of cut back on some of the fat because you're going to be burning your own fat and your own fat is the healthiest fat that you can burn.




But the key is this 18 hour fast. If you have to snack but within your eating window (between lunch and dinner), if you need to do that, but we don't want to snack after the dinner all the way to the next first meal. You can drink fluids, you want to take electrolytes and B vitamins for sure and sea salt that's a necessity. But we recommend you, you don't eat anything.



Food that are good to focus on

Foods that are really good to focus on would be pasture-raised eggs (Organic), shellfish, fish, sardines, meats, organic cheese ( a lot of people don't do well in cheese. Cheese has a lot of hormones, it's not good for people with prostate issues, it is not good with people that have allergies, so some people do not do well in cheese personally I do a small amount of cheese), olives, avocados, lots of vegetables (7 to 10 cups very beneficial), nuts (for some people they don't do well, on that especially if they're prone to kidney stones, you have to be careful with almonds ok as well as Spinach  if you're prone to kidney stones), also seeds like sunflower seeds perfect on a ketogenic Plan. Alright here you have it the basic ketogenic plan for beginners.