When you're sleep deprived, and please note that each of these consequences dominoes into the next one. First, you lose mental clarity. Since sleep helps maintain cognitive skills such as attention learning and memory, poor sleep can impact our ability to perceive the world accurately. Making it really challenging to handle even relatively minor stressors, especially since the decision-making and impulse control area of your brain, which is called your prefrontal cortex is dull. This might cause you to be more sensitive, more moody and more reactive. Hello, menopausal mood swings.

Losing mental clarity and cognitive skills totally impacts your ability to stay on track with your weight loss goals because it makes it even harder to make smart decisions that are in your best interest like staying on track with your healthy eating plan.

Next, number two, when you're sleep deprived, your pleasure seeking brain, your limbic system gets amped up. The limbic system is that part of your brain that groups and interconnects at least six key brain structures like your amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus hypothalamus, the basal ganglia, and the cingulate gyrus that runs right down the middle. Now, you don't have to remember those names, but you do need to know that this is a complex system that works in tandem to regulate your emotions, your stress, your memory, and also your thoughts, feelings, and motivation to get into action consistently around your goals.

Each of these functions are critical to determine and tell your body how to respond to keep you safe and thriving. If you're stressed out and unmotivated to get into action consistently each day and you can't even remember relevant information from day to day because your memory is affected, you will not thrive in life and you won't meet your goals. Your limbic system wants you to survive, but your brain and body clock sleep deprivation as a total threat, so your brain will just seek pleasure like sugar, white flour and calorie rich comfort foods.

No wonder we eat nutrient lacking less healthy carbs when we're tired. The next system, and the third thing that gets altered behind the scenes from sleep deprivation is your appetite hormones. When lacking sleep, the hunger hormone ghrelin and the fullness hormone leptin are unable to function correctly, causing you to eat when you're not hungry, and then you overeat too.

Now, that's a simplified overview because women who sleep less each night also have more waking hours. You already know that your mood and stress are altered when you're sleep deprived, so it just makes sense that you have more time to eat and you'll be emotionally eating instead of using true hunger cues. What's more, emotional eating causes you to eat those white powder foods made from white flour and sugar. Eating too much added sugar also increases ghrelin levels causing you to have more cravings. Likewise, a diet that is high in sugar, but low in fiber also leads to higher leptin levels that can ultimately lead to what's called leptin resistance, making it impossible to know when you are actually full.

Having healthy appetite hormones is critical to permanent weight loss health, and even happiness. Without functioning leptin and ghrelin, your eating patterns and cravings become what's called hedonic. Hedonic hunger is a relatively new term that scientists use to describe a powerful desire for food. In the absence of any true hunger cues, it's the cravings you experience when your stomach is full, but your brain is still ravenous to eat. This is what you might experience after you've eaten dinner. You feel full, but you eat a second helping or maybe dessert, even though you feel uncomfortably full, your pants feel snug and you just don't want to stop eating. That's hedonic hunger. Another example you might eat at night before bed for no real reason. That's also hedonic hunger. It's that desire to keep eating and getting the pleasure from food.

Number four, fourth system that is altered with too little sleep is cortisol. It's your stress hormone. Without sleep, your cortisol spikes and also alters your ability to process and respond to the hormone insulin making you feel hungrier and also hold onto fat. Remember that insulin is your fat storage hormone. If you don't get enough sleep, your body moves into fat storage mode that is driven by chronically elevated insulin that aligns and supports that research I shared from the University of Chicago where remember, the participants lost more fat with adequate sleep.