The One Reason You Aren't Getting Sleep
Sleep is recuperative, reparative and restorative. Sleep is one of the most important aspects of good health. If you aren't sleeping well, you aren't regenerating healthy cells. If you aren't generating healthy cells, you set ourself up to develop disease. It's as simple as that.
What's more, sleep is how we heal. It's now we get over the flu. It's how we regenerate night after night. Sleep is also an important way to keep appetite in check because when you're tired, you tend to want to eat more. All in all, there's no denying that sleep is central to overall health and wellbeing.
So why aren't you getting more sleep?
It's not a complicated question. With Americans burning the candle at both ends, sleep suffers. The CDC reports that an estimated 50-70 million US adults have sleep or wakefulness disorder. According to a Gallup poll four in 10 Americans get less than the recommended amount of nightly sleep, compared with the 11% who did so 70 years ago.
Specialists have named many causes of insomnia, blaming technology, room temperature, watching television, overwork, stress. To remedy insomnia they recommend creating nightly rituals, silence, appliances, darkness, ear plugs, blindfolds, reading before bed and timing your meals. Yet specialists often overlook the most obvious reason for insomnia, which is indigestion.
Fast-paced Americans are always on the move, giving them very little time to digest. Because motion causes digestion to stop, it can only resume when the body is at full rest. This often occurs when you sleep.
No thanks to poor feeding advice from the fitness industry, some Americans walk around with up to six undigested meals in their stomach each day. This is one of the main causes of gas, bloating, belching, digestive upset. Food eaten throughout the day is often left to ferment, until it is digested at night.
Depending on the way food is combined, digestion can either be a good experience or a bad one. Since most people don't put much thought into how they combine their food, it's no surprise that insomnia statistics prove that the overall digestive experience is a bad one. Let's look at some foods that contribute to insomnia.
Milk is an American bad habit, especially for kids. Milk and cookies before bed or milk with a late evening meal, creates the perfect storm of indigestion. If your child grinds their teeth at night they have indigestion. The same is true for an adult. In terms of proper food combining, it's important to remember milk is a food, it should never be eaten with food.Fruit is one of the healthiest foods known to man yet, if it's eaten late in the day or after a meal, fruit is absolute murder on the digestive tract. Since fruit digests quickly, it can often get stuck behind proteins and starches in the intestine causing putrefaction and the release of toxins into the gut. Stress is another reason indigestion occurs. This can occur after eating too many proteins at the same time. Too many proteins eaten at one time takes hours to digest making the stomach work well into the night to complete digestion.Starch and protein eaten together (think sandwich) interrupts digestion since the stomach needs to release different digestive enzymes for each food eaten in order to break it down. Therefore it's much easier on the stomach to keep meals simple with properly combined eating such as eating a protein with a vegetable or salad and having the potato at a separate meal, for example.Alcohol is another antagonist of the digestive tract. Alcohol triggers pepsin interrupting or slowing protein digestion. It is also perceived by the body as a poison. Having alcohol before going to sleep could mean undigested protein may be sitting in the digestive tract for another day. Incidentally, vinegar slows digestion in similar fashion.Fast and processed foods are perhaps the worst culprit of digestive stress. Fast and processed foods don't only mess with digestion, they confuse the body. Fast and processed foods, especially those that contain genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) and other additives, illicit an immune response in the gut. This happens because the body doesn't recognize GMO food on a cellular level, adding yet another step to the slowing of digestion.No thanks to Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) many of us walk around with up to five pounds of fecal matter in the digestive tract at all times. That's five pounds of putrefied, toxic, food not moving toward bowel --- until we go to sleep.
Whether or not we get good sleep ultimately depends on our living habits. Good sleep involves total inactivity of the body's limbs and organs (except for the heart and brain, which never rest.) European countries have the right idea when it comes to their resting habits. The mid-day siesta could be the key to overcoming insomnia. Here are some other simple suggestions to combat insomnia.
Eat fruit in the morning only. Avoid it after meals and especially at night.Eat fresh and simple meals using three to four ingredients. Lay off the heavy sauces.Practice proper food combining! Properly combine foods to encourage efficient digestion.Do not feel pressured to eat five to six meals a day because of any diet plan. Digestively speaking it's best to eat when you're hungry, even if that means 2-3 meals a day.Rest after meals. Can't rest? Eat easily digested food during the day like a fruit meal in the morning and a vegetable salad or broth for lunch. Save your protein meal for the evening when you can rest, since It is far better to eat protein in a properly combined meal and go to sleep than it is to eat an improperly combined meal and let it sit in the stomach all day.Stick with whole, natural foods and always avoid fast and processed foods, synthetic protein powers, artificial sweeteners and GMOs.
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