How Many Calories Do You Burn While Sleeping

When you are struggling to burn calories, can you imagine that calories are burning while you sleeping? According to Mary Ellen Wells, Ph.D., director of neurodiagnostic and sleep science at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the fact that calories are burned during sleep is certain because, a study shows that the human brain burns 20% of its calories each day, and it continues to do so even while sleeping.
However, do you exactly know how many calories can burn while sleeping? Dr. Wells indicates that the number of calories burned during sleep, there is no fixed number, this is because the entire sleep process, each stage of the change is not quite the same, coupled with each person's daytime activity and genetic genes are different, there will be some slight variability.

So, what are the specific factors that affect the calories we burn?

1.Excessive dieting: In medical research, the body has the instinct of self-preservation. When our calorie intake decreases, we can only lose about 3 to 5% of our body weight, but not necessarily fat, and may lose muscle. The weight regained later will be much more than the number lost by dieting.

2.Sleep. Many people believe that seven hours of sleep is enough and it doesn't matter when they sleep. However, growth hormone is one of the keys to maintaining the basal metabolic rate. The main secretion time of growth hormone is from 11:00 pm to 1:00 am, and the secretion of growth hormone will decrease if you sleep beyond this time, which will indirectly affect the basal metabolic rate.

3.Hormonal effects: The body has many endocrine and basal metabolic correlates.

4.Insufficient muscle volume: a kilogram of muscle can consume about 80 calories, but a kilogram of fat can only consume 4 calories; a kilogram of muscle is only about half the volume of a kilogram of fat. Half the volume of muscle can consume 20 times more calories how to think is a bargain.

5.Age: A person's basal metabolic rate peaks at age 25 and decreases by 2 to 5% every decade thereafter. The influence of age is the least discussed factor because no one can change it.

So, what are the specific factors that affect the calories we burn?

Sleep Burn Calculation

So how do we roughly calculate how many calories we can burn while sleeping at the moment?
Let's try to confirm how many calories you can burn during sleep by working out an approximate burn baseline with a simple formula. The number of calories your body burns at rest is your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which can be affected by weight, muscle mass, hormones, and age, but on average, one study found that about 45 calories are burned per hour.

Dr. Christopher Winter, a researcher in neurology and sleep medicine, said BMR is measured after eight hours of sleep and under fasting and neutral temperature conditions so that the energy expended for rest is actually measured. During sleep, the body burns about 95 percent of the calories it does during simple rest.
Therefore, if you can find the average calorie consumption of a person at rest (for example 45 calories/hour just mentioned above), you can calculate the calories burned during sleep. According to the formula proposed by Dr. Christopher Winter:

BMR per hour x 95% x hours of sleep

Therefore, during 8 hours of sleep 45 x 95% x 8 = 342, which works out to 342 calories that the body can burn during an 8-hour rest period.

The Impact of the Cyclic Phase of Sleep on Calories

In the past, scientists used to think of sleep as a passive state, a time when a person's brain and body rest and recover during the night. Now, however, researchers have found that the brain is very active while you sleep, during which the brain and some physiological operations may still be hard at work. As a result, your body burns the most calories when it is in deep REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement Sleep) because it requires more oxygen to function.

Dr. Christopher Winter points out that the human brain cycles through the four different stages of REM and NREM sleep repeatedly, approximately every 90 minutes. Likewise, the body's original metabolic activity occurs in a continuous cycle throughout the night, so the brain is just as active or even more active during REM sleep as it is when we are awake.

_{How to Increase the Amount of Burning}

If you really want to maximize the number of calories burned during sleep, then lower the temperature of your room! This is according to the American Association of Sleep Medicine AASM, keeping the temperature between 15-20 degrees Celsius while sleeping will allow the body to burn the most amount of calories. Why is that, says Dr. Christopher Winter, sleeping in a colder room forces the body to burn more calories to keep itself warm.

In addition to temperature, you should also make sure you are getting enough sleep because reducing the amount of sleep you get can have a negative impact on your overall metabolism. A 2012 study found that men who slept only five hours or less a night were almost four times more likely to develop obesity than normal sleepers. In addition, with less sleep, the body's production of important hormones such as leptin and growth hormone was found to be disrupted and can increase our hunger.

_Conclusion

Simply put, if you keep your bedroom cool and sleep-friendly, plus get 7-9 hours of sleep a night, it will be more likely to burn a few hundred calories while you sleep. But such calorie consumption is not as much as a controlled diet and exercise, so don't rely on sleep alone to try to reduce calories in large numbers, which is a very unwise decision.