Friday, protein shake in the AM (still makes me feel bloated--air in the blender shake or problem with the dairy in the whey protein?); hot dog w/o bun at 5 Guys; cheese, tomatoes, 1/2 avocado. Then a small amount of home-made ice cream (mostly cream/half & half, egg yolks, very little sugar), blood sugar afterwards 107.
Getting good sleep has been a long-term problem for me and sleep is one of the elements mentioned prominently by writers and researchers in the area of weight loss. Adequate sleep takes down stress levels, where inadequate sleep raises cortisol and insulin levels, both negative for healthy weight loss.
Robb Wolf makes it a very important part of his program. One of the things I eventually want to do is some intermittent fasting (Swede Martin Berkhan has one of the more interesting sites on this and has a particular protocol of working out and intermittent fasting to get very lean and muscular) and Wolf as much as says that until both your diet (paleo, of course) and sleep are in order, you shouldn't even attempt intermittent fasting.
My own sleep is made worse by being inconsistent--my natural tendency is to stay up late and I can very quickly be back to a late (read, 1-3 AM) bedtime. Any book on sleep disorders or increasing good sleep will mention consistency of bed-time/wake-time.
I also have interruptions to my sleep almost every night (i.e. I rarely sleep more than 4-5 hours at any one time) and once awake am often up for 1 1/2 to two hours. Part of the interruptions are normal for middle-aged guys: waking up to pee. But it is often because, since I use a CPAP for my sleep apnea, if my nose gets plugged up enough, you wake up (because the mask means you only breathe through your nose). That's the reason for: 1) doing the sleep studies and getting a new, better CPAP device and 2) doing this surgery and improving the air flow through my nose.
Temporarily, of course, sleep is much worse, since my nasal passages have been extremely swollen/inflamed due to the surgery, and I was having to sleep in a recliner to keep head higher to make drainage better. This meant three nights of even worse than even my usual crappy sleep: the night before the surgery with about 3 hours (on a late-night pattern, had to get up very early, stressed about the surgery), then not more than 2 hours at any one time for the next couple nights, waking up totally dried out (from breathing through my mouth) and uncomfortable. As my surgeon said, you'll have several days of cat-naps only.
Last night was my first night back in bed (yay!). My nasal passages weren't clear enough to use the CPAP when I went to bed (around 11:15). Slept until 1:30 or so, up for about an hour and a half, used saline to clear nose and got back to sleep around 3, but able to use my CPAP, awoke 7:30--so about 6.5 hours total (and I might yet go back to bed for another round).
Long-term, I need to work on several things:
- consistency of bed-time/wake-time (weekends as well as weekdays)
- figuring out a cut-off time for liquids to make sure the need to pee doesn't wake me up
- consistency of bed-time routine
- shutting off TV and not using computer after a certain hour
- dark as possible room (I usually do this)
- cool sleeping room (impossible now with the high heat here--I've had to keep our thermostat up near 78, even at night)
Hopefully this can lead to more consistent and deeper sleep (I would like to see around 7.5 hours per night), which should have huge physical and mental benefits.
I'll start tracking sleep better as part of this whole transformation.
