Chris is one of the owners here at Wenz and has 18+ years of experience in providing the community with comfortable and quality furniture. Not only does he know a thing or two about how the quality of our furniture affects our bodies, but he also knows how the quality of our sleep affects our lifestyles.
There’s a book that Chris read a couple years ago that changed his life. It’s called Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by T.S. Wiley. The book teaches you about the positives of getting high quality sleep and the negatives of not getting enough sleep in general. Since the book made such a big impact on Chris, we decided to interview him and ask him some questions about the book.
Wenz Staff: Can you give us a quick overview of the book Lights Out and tell us what it’s all about?
Chris: Yeah sure, so the book Lights Out has some really lofty goals. It provides an opportunity for everyone around the world to avoid things like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. That’s a big goal because if you add those up, those are all the major leading causes of death here in the United States.
After reading this book and taking some action, was there a noticeable difference in your energy levels throughout the day?
First of all, the reduction or elimination of sugar in your diet gives you immediate benefits by giving you more control of your insulin production. The difference you feel is more energy throughout the day. You don’t have that mid day crash, you don’t suffer from daytime fatigue, and it’s easier to wake up in the morning. Those were all immediate effects. The other key benefit for the reduction in sugar was the reduction of inflammation. In my case, I already have arthritis started, so that really helped me a lot.
How has the book affected your sleep and sleeping habits?
When it comes to sleep, and when you start practicing some of those dietary changes, which is basically the elimination of sugar, it’s much easier to fall asleep. I have less restless sleep and I sleep deeper and longer. By practicing some of the habits, the actual doing of these things, like not staring at a screen and having a ritual before bed, it only adds to those benefits. Sleeping in a cooler temperature was a big one for me.
What did you do to start sleeping cooler?
Well I use a latex mattress at home, which is a natural way to get a cooling effect. You want to bring your body temperature down significantly when you’re sleeping. You get your best sleep cycle when your body is in that cooler temp. For most people it takes a while, you know when you first go to bed you’re still a little bit wound up so you don’t hit that deeper cycle until later in the evening or early in the morning.
Nice, so what else do you do to stay cool throughout the night?
Changing your pajamas or just wearing less to bed helped. I keep the thermostat set lower. That’s easier to do during the winter time in Wisconsin than it is in August, but even then you can overcome the heat with keeping a fan on while you sleep. Having more space in your bed also helps. If it’s two people are sleeping in a queen bed vs. a king, you get a lot more space for airflow, so that made a huge difference.
When did you go buy your latex mattress? Was that a purchase you made because of the book or was it something you already had?
Immediately afterwards. What you’re trying to replicate in that sleeping environment is hibernating in a cave, right. So it’s super dark, super cool, quiet, no electric light, and I even went so far that I eliminated my alarm clock. I didn’t want that blue light to have any input on my sleep.
Can you dive deeper into why it’s so beneficial to sleep without any lighting?
Yeah for sure. The book gives us a scientific basis of how our bodies react to electric light, how that electric light mimics sunlight, and then how our bodies react to real sunlight. We’ve kind of been tricked into a perpetual summertime mode because we’re surrounded by lights every hour of the day. Ever since the invention of the electric light it’s always daytime for us, so our bodies act like it. Why that isn’t a good thing is because winter comes after summer. So we’ll naturally crave more carbohydrates to store up fat for the winter months, but if we’re tricking our bodies into thinking it’s always summer, winter never actually comes and we’ll just keep putting on weight.
How did you overcome putting on weight by sleeping more?
For me, I dropped weight almost effortlessly. With a combination of diet and much improved sleep, and it sounds strange but I slept more, and as I slept more I lost weight faster.
So sleeping more and exercising less helped you lose weight?
Yup! Here’s how it works: Some people are constantly running to the gym or workout 3-5 times a week and don’t seem to be able to lose any weight. What the book gets at is that kind of heavy exercise kicks off the cortisol in your body. Cortisol is like a signal to our body to get ready for fight or flight so we would be able run from danger when we were in the wild. Since there isn’t any bears chasing us anymore our body tends to interpret that as stress. We want to store more energy and crave carbohydrates as a result of that stress, which doesn’t really sync up with our modern day lives. It seems counterintuitive that you would be working out more and not getting any results. Matter of fact you would almost be going backwards. Whereas if you tried to reduce the amount of cortisol your body produces and slept better and more, it would make it easier to lose weight.
What kind of exercise do you actually commit to then?
Lots of walking, lots of walking, and standing instead of sitting. Sitting is terrible for us, it’s the new smoking. We’re just not designed to be sitting for extended periods of time. We sit at our desks all day at work and then come home and sit on our sofa. So what I do is just take advantage of places I can walk to instead of drive to. Like walking home from the grocery store. I also have a standing desk in my office that really saves my back. Finding opportunities to be more active at work, taking time to stretch, and some light weightlifting has been working great.