Earlier this week, we posted this fact about sleep: “Did you know that you can lose 14.3 lbs a year by sleeping one more hour per day?”. A lot of folks called out “BS!”. It’s true – recovery, especially sleep, should be the third component of every diet and fitness plan.

Here’s how it works:

Quality is just as important as duration: When you ask most people, “how did you sleep?”, they will either answer “good” or “bad”, and at the most they may tell you how many hours they slept. No one considers how the quality of the sleep that they get affects everything from memory, to muscle growth and repair, to appetite.

Your body composition changes while you sleep: There are in fact 5 stages of sleep. During deep sleep, Human Growth Hormone is secreted. Human Growth Hormone is a substance naturally occurring within the human body that promotes cell regeneration in your bones, vital organs and muscles and reduces the amount of fat circulating in the body. Human Grown Hormone regulates body composition by triggering lipolysis and promoting muscle growth.

You manage what you measure: At DailyBurn, we live by this the phrase. If you hit a weight loss plateau and have already dialed in your nutrition and exercise perfectly, sleep may be the key to unlocking further fat loss. By looking at the duration of your deep sleep versus light sleep with the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, you can identify whether your sleeping patterns allow you to secrete enough human growth hormone. The Zeo even sednds auto-updates each day to your DailyBurn locker room.

Not sleeping well enough to reap the benefits of deep sleep? Tomorrow, we’ll give you our top 5 ways to get a better night’s sleep.

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