It a Long Weekend- Sleep late

This is no news – the more and better quality sleep you get the better you are at either losing weight or maintaining your healthy weight.  You don’t have to believe me, there are tons of medical articles on the subject.

I am a good sleeper.  I don’t take this for granted.  I come from a family full of bad sleepers and I am also married to one.

As a child my youngest sister Janet had the nickname inside our family of “Mutt.”  She earned this unattractive name not because she was not cute, but because of her nightly sleeping ritual.

Long after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, Janet would drag her red Snoopy sleeping bag from her bed and walk the very long distance from her room down the hall, up the stairs through both the big and the little living rooms and into my parents bedroom.  Silently she would curl up on the sleeping bag at the foot of my parent’s bed, much like a trusted family dog, thus the “Mutt” moniker.

In the night my parent’s bedspread usually fell to the floor covering my sister completely.  My mother was already not sleeping well and my father’s snoring did not help.

My mother’s best sleep came after 4:30 when my father would get up to make his long commute to New York City.  As he would try to silently leave their room he would invariably kick Janet at the foot of the bed, never learning that she was going to be there for many years.

My husband is a broken sleeper too.  He starts in one bed and sleeps for about four hours then wakes up and spends about two or three hours awake and is sometimes able to fall back to sleep, usually in a different place in the house.

I am proof that just being a good sleeper will not make you thin.  Russ, as a bad sleeper is thin so it is not making him fat.  I think it helps that he does not eat when he is awake in the middle of the night.  But if you are sleeping you can’t be eating.  And being tired lowers your defenses against boredom or binge eating.

If you are hungry late at night, go to sleep rather than eat.  It will keep you from eating that night and if you got a good night’s rest it might keep you from over eating the next day.