Food Freedom Friday - Lose Weight with less than 8 hours of sleep

All right, I think we're working. I think we're— I think we're live. Let me see. Okay, perfect. We are. All right, here we go. Good morning. It's early Friday on a holiday weekend. It's good to see some beautiful faces here. I don't care about makeup. I don't care about hair. Y'all see I got my little hat on. Ponytail. All good, all good. All right, so welcome to Food Freedom Friday. This is the third installment of a 7-part series that I'm doing, and I came up with this idea because I just wanted to do something different and I wanted to help you all. So when you think about weight loss, there's so many like antiquated rules that we hear, like you gotta do this, you gotta Eat less, you've got to move more, you've got to do this, you've got to do this to lose weight. And my people are frustrated dieters. We have tried all the rules, we have tried all of the things to lose weight, and they don't work. Doesn't work. So I came up with Food Freedom Friday because my mission is to help women stop dieting forever so you can get off the weight loss struggle bus and lose weight for the last time without a diet, without the drama. But I wanted to pick apart some very specific dieters' rules that we believe we have to follow in order to lose weight and give you an alternative way to, to do it, to think about like what needs to happen in order to lose weight. Hello, Facebook people. So this is going to be me talking. If you have questions, you can type them in the chat. For those of you who are on Zoom, if you're on Facebook, you can go ahead and put them in the comments. I can see them on my phone. And even if you're watching a recording and you're not watching it live, you can still type in your comments and questions, tag me, and I'll come back and answer them. But this is the third one that I'm doing of a 7-part series. If you missed the first 2, we've already talked about eating in moderation, that rule of eating in moderation. We talked about going cold turkey and just eating all like unprocessed, super healthy, like, foods at one time and the problem with that. And I gave you an alternative to following a diet like Whole30. And so today we're gonna talk about sleep. But if you wanna go back and make sure you catch those other lives that I did, y'all got a YouTube channel and people are subscribing and watching. I'm like, what? So I'm putting these, these recordings out on YouTube. You can go follow me on YouTube. I'll put the link in the notes somewhere. Also, if you're on my email list, I'm sending out a link to the recording. If you're not on my email list, you'll want to do that today and get on my list to receive my weekly newsletter called Food Freedom. It comes out every Sunday, so you can go to jenniferdance.com/foodfreedom. To get on my newsletter, and then you also will know when the next Food Freedom Friday is happening, and all the other things that I am announcing and offering. Okay, so food freedom. This should be your goal, right? Your goal shouldn't just be to like, oh, I just wanna get into a size 8. I just wanna get into— and it's— let me just talk. Let me go on a little tangent about sizes real quick. I was, uh, coaching a private client yesterday. Oh, and by the way, I do have spaces open for private clients that I'm filling for the rest of the year. So if you're interested in working with me one-on-one, we can absolutely talk about that. You can go to my website, jenniferdent.com, and book a strategy session with me completely free, 60 minutes, and you can tell me what you've been struggling with. And I will give you my plan, like what, what I think and believe will help you get to your forever weight. But anyway, I was working with a private client yesterday, and she was very focused on getting out of her size 12s into her size 8s. And I was like, dear client of mine, I said, you know that these designers, like, the numbers that we see on the insides of our clothing is just random. It's arbitrary. It doesn't mean anything. We're putting so much weight on this number. And I was like, you know, a size 8 that you're wanting to get into now is not the same size 8 from like 1980 or 1988. Designers have actually been increasing the size of their clothes and not changing the size, because Americans are getting bigger, and they know if women keep going up in size, they're not gonna wanna buy the same clothes. So they have been slowly expanding the size of their clothes and not changing the size. So don't allow someone— some, some designers sat around a table and like, okay, we're gonna make this a size 12, and we're gonna make this a size 8. Doesn't mean anything. And if you go to a different country, it's a different size, like it's a different size system. So just for those of you who are very focused on like, oh, I gotta get back into my size 6s, let that go. Let that go. Your goal should be to achieve food freedom. That's what your ultimate goal should be. I'm gonna tell you what food freedom is if you don't understand. Food freedom is that place where you can go out to eat and eat what you want without having to use scare tactics to stop yourself from eating, without having to say, girl, if you eat this, you know you gonna gain some weight, or make yourself feel badly when you do decide to eat something, eat something that you really, really want to enjoy. Food freedom is when you can go out to happy hour with your friends and not be guilty. I met one of my very good friends last night. For happy hour, and we had so much fun. We had so much fun. She had— she had 2 cocktails. I had a glass of Prosecco. We split salmon tacos, truffle fries. We split half a burger, mussels. Like, it was just divine. And I want you to be able to enjoy those moments without feeling guilty or without Restricting yourself when you go in and say, girl, I gotta just have a salad. Like, I can't do it. I can't do anything else. That's not food freedom. Food freedom is being able to travel for work, travel for vacation, travel for, you know, get on a road trip and not feeling compelled or feeling like you can't eat what everyone else is eating. That is food freedom. Food freedom is being able to sit down to eat when you're hungry and being able to stop when you're done, even if that means there is food left on the plate. Last night we were at the bar at happy hour. Oh, the other thing we had was just really, really good, were these bacon-wrapped dates that were on like a plate of like some type of blue cheese dressing. Fabulous. If you like the salty and the sweet, amazing. But the bartender was like, you guys want to dip your fries into the, the blue cheese dressing? And I was like, Oh, let me try it. Let me try. Don't take the plate away. Let me try it. I didn't make myself feel guilty of like, oh, that's too fattening. Oh, that's too whatever. But did I clean the plate of— did I eat all the French fries and like lick the plate clean of the dressing? No. He took the food away and there were French fries left. There was burger left. There were mussels left. And it was not a problem. It was not a problem. I don't feel compelled to eat everything because I know that there is another meal in the future. Food freedom, y'all. Food freedom is when you give the middle finger to the oppressive diet industry and these diet rules that we believe we need to follow. This is the reason why Food Freedom Friday came into fruition, because I'm like, y'all, stop doing these like crazy things that the diet industry or whoever is telling you that you need to do to lose weight. There is another way. People, my clients, the people on my program, they are learning how to stop dieting forever so they can achieve food freedom. And we are giving the middle finger to these oppressive rules and we're just letting them go. We don't follow them anymore. But instead of saying, I'm not doing that, and you think it's a free-for-all, I'm giving you some alternative things. These new concepts that you can begin to implement immediately so you don't have to feel like, I gotta, I gotta like eat less, I gotta exercise more. Okay, so food freedom should be your goal, not to get into a size 6, not to get into a size 4. That's all great and lovely. You feel excited when you get into it. But you know, once you get into that size 8, that size 6, that size 4, the kids are still like, mommy, mommy, mommy, I need this. I need— your boss is still like, um, can we get this please? Like, life still goes on. Nobody cares that you're now into a size 4 or a size 6 or whatever it is. So don't make that your focus. I want you to focus on achieving food freedom. Okay? So today we're talking about this rule. I don't even know where it came from. And I was about to, like, try to Google it, and I was like, why? We all understand. We all know somebody somewhere told us, like, we need to get 8 hours of sleep a night, and that will help us with weight weight loss. And I remember when I learned about this rule, and I was like, oh my God, that sounds amazing! All I have to do is like go to bed. Because at that time, when I was trying to lose weight and I was stuck on the yo-yo diet— and if y'all don't know my story, I was on a diet, off the diet, quitting a diet, literally for 20+ years. Since, uh, freshman year of college into my— well, into my late 30s, I was on a diet, off a diet, are in the process of quitting a diet. All I did in order to try to lose weight, I could never keep it off. And I could never lose enough to get to my goal. So when I heard about this new research that sleeping 8 hours a night helps you with burning fat and losing weight, I was like, oh, cool. Because I was doing these grueling workouts. I was believing I needed to do all this extra exercise to burn enough calories. Yeah, I was going— yeah, did anybody else go to Orange Theory Fitness? I try to go to like 5 AM class at Orange Theory Fitness, man. Out running. And I used to go to this other high-end gym in Philly. I see some, some people here from Philly. I used to go to Unite Fitness. 90-minute workouts, y'all, killing it. Burning my calories. I used to post pictures of that calorie burn and put it on social media, believing that's what I needed to do to lose weight and keep it off. So when I heard of like, oh, I can sleep 8 hours and magically burn fat, I was like, all right, let me like try to like get to like get to bed earlier and go to sleep. But for those of you who are like me, Sleeping 8 hours every single day is impossible. It's impossible. There's work, there are kids that need to be, you know, I don't have any biological children, but I have a dog that needs to be taken care of. Your kids have to be, they have to be woken up and they have to be fed and clothed and bathed and driven to wherever they need to go. There are, I used to travel a lot for work. I had to wake up 3 AM to get to the airport for like a 6 AM flight, you know. So sleeping 8 hours a night just was a nice pipe dream. It wasn't possible. So I don't want you to think that like if you're not getting 8 hours of sleep, then that's a problem. I don't want you to beat yourself up and be like, I'm never going to be able to lose weight because I can never get this much sleep. I talked about this, um, this concept in the group. So I like to like introduce these concepts that I'm coming up with inside of my group coaching program. So I talked about this on the call on Tuesday and I was like, who here gets 8 hours of sleep? And one person was like, she raised her hand very timidly and I was like, great. But she was like, I still wake up tired. So those of you who are getting 8 hours of sleep and you still wake up tired, Or you get 8 hours of sleep. And so funny, because she was on the call and she was just yawning. And I was like, look who's over there yawning. That person who gets 8 hours of sleep. And we all started laughing. But you feel like you need to take a nap in the middle of the day. That's not getting quality sleep. So instead of you trying to focus on, yep, I need to get 8 hours of sleep so I can lose weight, I want to give you something different to think about. I want you to focus on quality of sleep versus quantity of sleep. Listen, we have enough things to worry about. I don't want y'all having to worry about like, I got to get 8 hours of sleep so I can lose weight on top of everything else you're dealing with. Don't get me wrong. Sleep is essential for your health. There are benefits to it. Your weight loss can be enhanced with sleep, but it's not the— quantity of sleep that's most important. It is the quality of sleep, OK? The quality of sleep. So when you're thinking about getting healthy, when you're thinking about losing weight, you're focusing on the quality over your sleep quantity. Here is why. I'm going to give you 2 ways that you can do that. Hey, Sabrina. Good to see you. I'm going to give you 2 things that you can do to improve your quality of sleep and stop worrying about the quantity. I just see Sabrina on here who's been through my programs, new mom. She ain't getting 8 hours of sleep. It's not possible. So instead of focusing on 8 hours of sleep, I want you to think about the quantity— quality of your sleep. The better the quality of sleep, it allows your body to get into a restorative state, which is what we want. The person who sleeps 8 hours and still wakes up tired, your body is not getting into a restorative state. This simply means that your cells aren't doing what they need to do to give you the energy that you're— that you need to feel to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go for the day. That is it. When your body is in a restorative state, which means it's in a deeper state of sleep, your human growth hormone increases. Your human growth hormone, when that increases, your body can burn some fat. It can actually help repair itself and do the things, the health benefits that we really actually want to happen versus when you're sleeping 8 hours, but it's not the quality sleep. You're waking up tired. You're just above restorative sleep like you're in that, like you're, you're, you're laying back, you're tired, but you're not getting rest. Okay? So I know I'm seeing little baby hands on the camera. I know for moms, when you're like new mom, you, you sleep with like one eye open. Or like you have one ear cocked because you're like, oh, I'm— my baby's going to cry, or you want to hear what's happening. I'm a very deep sleeper. My husband sleeps with like one— he hears everything, and he like, every noise, he like jumps up. He's a, he's a lighter sleeper than I am. So here's the two things that you can do to improve your quality of sleep. And just by having my own experience and coaching hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women, one of the things that gets in way of them getting a higher quality of sleep is stress. Very, very simple. Stress. So the one thing you want to start doing and working on is de-stressing your brain because a stressed brain does not allow for a sound sleep. Very simple. A stressed brain— y'all write this down because that's very good. I came up with it on Monday. A stressed brain does not allow for a sound sleep. How many of us— and I was guilty of this too— go from straight from a work day, we file right into our second job of like kids, getting the house together, cooking dinner, doing whatever we need to do, spending time with the spouse or the partner, walking the dog— if you go straight into our second job, we fall out on the couch trying to stay awake because we're like, oh, now it's me time. I get to like watch TV. We're stacking on the couch, and then we fall right into bed. At no point during the day are we doing anything to de-stress our brains. How many of us take work straight into bed? You go to sleep thinking about what you didn't accomplish today, or you're thinking about what do you have to accomplish tomorrow, or you're like, oh my God, is it Friday yet? Like, your brain, your brain is still going. Going on high speed and you're trying to go to sleep. That will keep you from a restorative state of sleep. For me, very specifically, I had to work very consciously on my sleep, getting sleep as an entrepreneur, because I would work 12 hours a day. I would coach until 8, 9:30, 9 o'clock at night and then go straight to bed, and my brain is like, still going, still going. When your, your body does exactly what your brain tells it to do. So if your brain is so focusing on work, guess what your body's not doing? It's not getting into this. What we want is this restorative state of sleep. So a couple of things that you can do to de-stress your brain, and y'all, this is going to take doing something different, because nothing will change if nothing changes. So you want to start trying to create this nighttime ritual. If I can't— I can't think of like a better word for it, but literally it's changing the way that you go to sleep, preparing your brain before you go to sleep, and doing this every day and being consistent with it. So that could simply be journaling, which is what I teach my clients to do, of like, just— they know, they know how to do a brain dump. Grab a piece of paper, um, and a pen and write down everything you're worried about. Just write it down, dump it out of your head, get your brain slowing, slowing down, so slowing down your brain and get it out of your brain on paper. Recently I started writing down gratitude. So before I go to sleep, I have my little reMarkable. I'll take it into the bedroom. I'll write down 3 to 5 things that I'm grateful for that I— that, that happened during the day. I'll write down 3 wins that I accomplished over the day. And this is something from a book that I recently read. Called The Gap in the Game, or The Gain in the Gap, something like that. You can look it up. And I'll write down 3 things that I want to accomplish tomorrow. So instead of worrying about like, how am I gonna get this done? Or I've got so much to do tomorrow. I'll just like, you know what, there's 3 things I'm going to accomplish tomorrow. I don't know how that's gonna happen. And sometimes I'll write down, okay, like, let me, while I'm sleeping, process solve a problem and, you know, come wake up in the morning and come up with some ideas of how we can tackle the day ahead. Okay, so de-stressing your brain. Journaling is one thing you can do. For those of you who are familiar with tapping, Emotional Freedom Technique, you can do that. You can go on YouTube. If you don't know what it is, go on YouTube and search for tapping for sleep. And see what comes up. It's literally just a process of calming your nervous system down by tapping on meridians or certain points on your body while repeating, um, statements to like release the energy. And to, um, I'm no EFT expert, but I do tapping a lot, and it's very effective. So you can go search for tapping for nighttime and try that. You could do evening yoga. Lots of people love to do yoga. You can do evening yoga. You can take a bath. You can sip chamomile tea. Like, make that your time. Put your phone down, right? Put your phone on sleep before— an hour before you need to go to sleep. Turn off the TV. Wind down mentally. Give yourself 15 to 20 minutes to just do this work to de-stress your brain and allow your body to get into restorative sleep. Y'all, that's easy. Doing that 15 minutes, 20 minutes at nighttime is easy. I'm not saying to lose weight you gotta go run a marathon, or wake up and like, you know, go jog 5 miles. That's not what I'm telling you to do. I'm saying to write, to get to sleep earlier, period. So easy. De-stress your brain. Find something that works well for you. The, the second thing you're gonna wanna do to improve your quantity— quality of sleep and not your quantity. Your quality of sleep is allowing your digestive system to do its job and process the food from the day. How does this happen? This means for those of you who love to snack on the couch before you go to sleep while you're watching Netflix, Stop it. You're going to want to stop putting food into your mouth at least 3 hours before you go to bed. 2 at the latest before you go to sleep. For all of my nighttime snackers, you're like, no, don't take my nighttime snacks away from me. We could talk about the reasons why you're snacking at night. That's a whole other— we talk about nighttime snacking. We call it sleepy snacking in my group. Sleepy snacking all the time, stress snacking all the time. If you're doing this destressing your brain process, it might mitigate your need to have a snack at nighttime. It's an interesting experiment. You should try it. But allowing your body, your digestive system to process the food that you have consumed during the day is nothing but a huge health benefit for you. It allows your cells to do what it needs to do. It allows you to create more of this human growth hormone that will help with the fat loss, because just sleeping 8 hours is not gonna actually tap into your fat stores, right? So you're allowing your, your body to burn more fat when you stop eating at nighttime. Okay? So you get to decide what time that is for you. And I know for those of you who struggle with the nighttime snacking, it is an emotional, emotionally driven urge to eat. It is not a physical hunger. This is where coaching comes into play. If you, if you can't just stop eating at nighttime and do that consistently without using willpower, we have got to, like, tap into the reasons why you are emotionally eating at nighttime. This is where coaching comes into play. If you've never been coached for weight loss, it could be the reason why you're struggling with your weight. Again, I am a coach. I am a— I'm a health— I'm a certified health coach and life coach and weight loss coach. I'm a perfect trifecta. Hey, if you've never worked with a coach, go to my website, JenniferDent.com, and you can see how you can work with me and how coaching can help you lose weight for the last time. Stop following all these dieting rules. Stop trying to do all the things that they say you need to do to lose weight. I just wanna talk about one more thing before— and I'll— I'm happy to take questions if we have any in the chat on Facebook or on— what do you call this thing? Zoom. There's one thing that you can— that can help you additionally with improving your sleep quality, and this helped me immensely. It's optional, right? It's not anything you have to have, but I'm very much in favor of this Oura Ring. My group, my clients know all the time I'm like always talking about the Oura Ring. This really helps me improve my sleep quality because it tracks— it's It's, it's tech, right? It's health tech. It tracks your nighttime data. And actually now I know the newer Apple Watches do the same thing. What you want to be able to look at is your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, and what your numbers are. That will tell you whether you're getting quality sleep or not. Oura Ring, I believe, is like the holy grail. I love my Oura Ring. I've had it over 2 years. I think someone in the group also told me that one of the Samsung watches also did the same thing. I'm not sure about Fitbit, but if you're looking at wearable technology to wear at nighttime, you definitely want to make sure that whatever tech you're using, it's, it's checking your resting heart rate at nighttime, because the goal is you want your heart rate to hit its lowest earlier in the evening. And not 5 minutes before you have to wake up. When your heart rate hits its lowest, that means you are— your body is recovering. You've hit that restorative state. Your heart rate variability is the other number you want to look at. And that just basically tells you the variation between your heartbeats. And it really is an indicator of whether you are— if your body's recovering from stress or not. So if you want to know— if this de-stressing ritual that you're doing at nighttime is really affecting your body, you really want to look at your heart rate variability. So when I— those late nights for me, so this is how my Oura Ring helps me. The late nights for me when I coached at 7 and 8 and I would be done work at like 9, and y'all, for me, coaching is like a high. I love coaching. I get excited. I get the coaches high. I love connecting with women. I love seeing their transformation. So coaching does not stress me out, but your body reacts to like excitement and stress in the same way. So my heart rate is elevated and my body is in like a stress state because I'm excited and I love what I do so much. So I would take that energy and I would like try to go to bed even by like I would finish work at 9:00 and try to go like 10:30. My body was— my heart rate was still elevated. And I was not able to get into a restorative state of sleep at nighttime. So when I got this Oura Ring, I noticed on Tuesdays my heart rate variability was so much lower because my body was in this, like, even though I was like, yeah, I love my job, I love what I do, I was excited. It was keeping me from getting into a deep resting sleep. So I was like, oh, Tuesdays, we got to do something. We got to like decompress. And so that's when I started doing this, like, I need a wind-down ritual to, like, calm my nervous system down so I can, like, hey, going to sleep now, body. Like, we're going into a restorative state of sleep. I want all the human growth hormone stuff happening tonight. I had to do this to calm my nervous system down so I could go to sleep. So I noticed my heart rate variability, even though it was a late night for me, my heart rate variability numbers were rising. Which is what we want. So I have my own personal data that tells me when I do this de-stressing process ritual at night before I go to bed, it definitely affects my body's ability to recover and allows me to get into a higher quality of sleep because Lord knows I don't sleep 8 hours. My average is probably like 6 and a half to 7. Which is good, but I don't sleep 8 hours at all. Okay, I see a bunch of y'all on Facebook. Do we have any questions, or do we have any questions on Zoom? You know, we're at the top of the hour. I know new moms are like, but wait, I can't— I'm so— new moms, y'all are in a special— you're in a special phase. You're in a special state. This is the time where you're bonding with your baby. Roman is his name, right, Sabrina? He's so cute. Okay, see you later, Haley. It's good to see you again. All right, y'all, again, if you have any questions, you can simply put them in the comments. You can email me, Jennifer, uh, at jenniferdent.com. If you're interested in how coaching can help you lose weight for the last time, I'm your girl. Let's talk about it. You can book a 60-minute free strategy call with me, and I will tell you all the reasons why you aren't losing weight, and I will tell you exactly what you need to do not to just lose weight, but to achieve food freedom. Because that's what you want, not the size 6. You wanna be able to achieve food freedom. Okay? Next week we're doing the same thing. Next week, I forget what next week's topic is, but if you're on my email list, you will find out. 9:30, Food Freedom Friday will continue with number 4 of the 7-part series. Okay, have a wonderful holiday weekend for those of you in the US. Bye!