When I first started this journey in July of 2014, one of the MAJOR changes I was making was getting to bed by 9pm.  As a night owl, this wasn’t an easy thing to change; my entertainment life basically started when our children went to bed!  But after watching countless videos by Stephanie Person & Dr. Stephen Phinney about the importance of sleep in order to keto adapt, I knew it was something I had to do.  And I did.  What a change it made in me!  Both physically and mentally and I was quite energetic from the good quality sleep I was now getting.

I was going to bed quite early, somewhere around 8pm and getting that deep and much needed REM, with lots of dreams!  I hadn’t had dreams in many years, which meant I hadn’t gotten good sleep in all that time.  Ugh.  But yes, when trying to get into a state of nutritional ketosis, SLEEP IS VITAL.  It’s at night when the body is looking for energy and using for fat!  Aka, ketones! BUT if you’re awake, lol it’s NOT happening.  Hello muscle loss being converted into glucose and hello high blood sugar. 

Well anyways, I didn’t remember these important details and life happened!  Our family took a vacation for a week and my blood sugar went up and so did my weight.  It was a like trying to stop a freight train and I couldn’t understand why.  So yes, I’d cheated and ate chocolate on our trip.  I thought, “So what?! I can’t do THAT much damage!”  What I didn’t realize that I was on the uphill slope of not getting good sleep and going through a very stressful time in my life.  I thought if I just stay keto with my eating, I should do just fine.  Wow, how wrong I was.

Fast forward to this month.  I signed up for Stephanie Facebook group and started to watch the conversations and realized that 2 things were raising my blood sugar and stopping ketosis; sleep & stress.  Now, I know what some of you are thinking: I can’t

control what’s happening around/to me!  No, we can’t BUT WE CAN control how we are reacting to it!    Every situation is different, so just do your best in whatever place you are! For me, I find a quite place every couple of hours and just sit and listen to soft music and calm my mind down.  And try to turn off your electronics at night!  We spend way too much time staring at our cell phones or tablets and we need blue light blockers. Amazon it!  There are some very cheap blue light blocking glasses on there and who knows, maybe we might have some good sleep.  If you DO buy them, put them on once the sun goes down!

Our body & minds deserve that we at least try to heal ourselves doing what we can, when we can naturally.  It’s our one body we’re given, I think it’d behoove us to try and take care of it as best as our abilities allow.

Current Schedule:

8:30pm, Shut off electronics, anything with blue light.  Cell phone, TV, computer, ect.

8:45pm-9:00pm, Lay down in bed and listen to a tv show on my cell; Right now I’m listening to Frasier 🙂

Sleep occurs somewhere around 9:30pm and 11:00pm.  Totally missing REM. Ugh. 

Goal schedule: 

Sundown: Put on blue light blocking glasses.
8:00pm, Shut off electronics, anything with blue light.

8:30pm, Lay down in bed and listen to something soothing; Christian music or Frasier will do I think.

Hopefully sleep happens before 9:30pm and getting that fantastic deep, REM sleep.