The “Get Some Rest” Diet

I don’t know any overweight people, including myself, who are in the habit of actually giving their big tired bodies the sleep that they so badly and obviously need. In my six weeks of recent unemployment, I’ve woken up to an alarm exactly zero times. I’ve also stopped drinking coffee, and started (returned to) eating better. I’ve lost weight. There is a direct connection.

When I wake up to an alarm, I feel awful. I can’t just have a cup of coffee and shake it off like most people. I either sleep until my body wants to wake up, or I feel energy-deprived every second of the day.

For the first three or four hours of consciousness, I mainly want to fall back asleep. Since that’s not possible, I fight it by mainlining caffeine. Unfortunately, coffee has a creeping effect on me (like hash brownies), so it doesn’t really kick in until about noon.

Feeling tired all the time isn’t just a physical condition. It starts to make you feel sad about life overall, and depressed about the routine that is keeping you from sleep. Not having simple needs covered, like comfort or the ability to focus on work, make it a lot harder to really care about loftier goals, like looking good enough to have sex with. All you want to do is get through the day without feeling like complete shit. Also, you want more energy. Corn syrup and white flour to the rescue! They solve both problems. Granted, they only do so for about 20 minutes. But when you’re drowning, you just want air.

I grew up thinking that my need for lots of sleep was some kind of flaw. In high school, I was often late for my first class, or missed it entirely. The teacher stopped assigning me detentions, and simply started removing points from my overall grade. English Lit with Mr. Gray. It was one of my favorite classes. Too bad it started at 7:40am. Just seeing that time written on my screen makes me angry, even after all these years. 7:40am! Presumably so that parents could get their kids out the door before they have to go to work. Cruel, senseless torture. In retrospect, I pat myself on the back for bothering to get to school that early as often as I did. I could never do it now.

The obvious solution is to go to sleep earlier. But by evening, if you’ve spent the day loading up on caffeine, sugar, and processed food, you can’t sleep. More importantly, you don’t want to. Your body is finally starting to feel sated. The psychological pressure of having to face the rest of the day has dissipated. Finally, you have a little bit of time to actually live. And you don’t want to use that time to sleep. So you stay up late doing the things that you wish you’d had the time or energy to do earlier. Or maybe you just veg out and watch TV, not because you’re lazy and boring, but because you want some relief, some oblivion, some escape. When fatigue starts to set in, it feels like you’re being dragged back into a dungeon you spent all day escaping from. You fight to stay awake with the same anger you felt at having to get out of bed in the first place. At 2 or 3am, you finally fall asleep, completely exhausted, malnourished, and depressed.

Supposing it’s only Monday night, you’ve already begun your sleep deficit for the week. What you really need to be whole at this point is sleep for ten or twelve hours. But instead, you sleep for six. The alarm goes off. You feel yourself emerging once again into a restless hell, with the evening far, far away, and all that sugar and flour so very close by.

image by noahg