Why You Can’t Sleep (And What to Do About It)
Ever find yourself wide awake at night, mind racing, unable to sleep—only to be falling asleep at your desk the next afternoon? Yeah, same. In this episode, we dive deep into the science of sleep with Dr. Param Dedhia, an expert in sleep, obesity, and integrative medicine, to answer all your burning (or drowsy) questions. Why do we even need sleep? How much is enough? And most importantly—how can we actually get better sleep? If you’ve ever struggled with exhaustion, cravings, or just wanted permission to prioritize rest, this episode is for you!
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Juna: Food We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health. Home of full plate living.
Okay, how many times has this happened to you? It's starting to get later in the day. You came home from work. You have all this stuff to do. You're working somewhere. Oh my god. Now it's time to go to bed and you're trying to go to bed and you're trying and trying and your mind is racing and you're talking faster and faster and you just can't fall asleep.
Meanwhile, it's the daytime, you're at work, it's 1pm, and you're like, time for coffee number 35, because I'm literally falling asleep at my desk. Okay, like, there's something going on here with our sleep that we're really really Not understanding.
Eddie: You know, so many of my patients tell me that they make progress with their eating, they can make progress with even, like, learning how to cook, but the sleep, that's what suffers.
As one woman told me, where do you think I found the time to follow your recommendations to exercise and cook? Something had to go, so I just get less sleep.
Juna: And not only that, maybe she's taking away time from her sleeping, but then taking away time from your sleeping also makes you hungry and makes you like want more sugar and then also doesn't make you want to exercise.
So I just feel like, I don't even know, do I spend time sleeping more? Do I spend? More time meal prepping and less sleeping. It's just like, it's so confusing. So I
Eddie: have to say that we have the same chocolate bar in the same cabinet and it looks so different on a night when I haven't slept well, I just can't convince myself not to eat it.
Let me tell you this one story about my medical internship. So this was by far the worst sleepier of my life.
Music: Okay.
Eddie: I was in the hospital since the prior morning, so it's now the next afternoon, and I finally sneak off to a call room to crash before we're gonna have the afternoon rounds. Okay. So to make sure that I wouldn't sleep through like the night from 4 p.
m. on. I asked a friend, could you, like, just call me on the pager? Now in those days, they were like these What's a
Juna: pager?
Eddie: This was like a voice pager. So you would hear someone's voice and just had you only had one chance to listen.
Juna: Like a walkie
Eddie: talkie? Yes, a one way walkie talkie. Okay. So I manage to wake up on my own.
I crawl into a crowded elevator in the hospital, and I wedge myself in the corner, and I am possibly asleep on my feet. Okay, like, like a flamingo. Yeah, but not quite as pretty. Okay. And just then, in an otherwise quiet elevator, my friend's voice booms out. Eddie, wake up! Get your ass out of bed! Rounds in five minutes.
Juna: That's so funny!
So today we're going to be talking all about the thing we spend a third of our lives doing. No matter who you are you spend a third of your life roughly asleep. How much sleep do we need? Why is it important? Why do we even sleep in the first place?
Eddie: And what can we do to actually get enough sleep?
Juna: I'm Yuna Jada
Eddie: and I'm Dr.
Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna: And you're listening to Food We need to talk a podcast that is quite possibly helping you fall asleep right now.
Eddie: regular listeners may know that we usually interview the experts on the show in advance and then bring their thoughts and quotes into the show. When Yuna and I are talking,
Juna: we bring you in a bridge. Diversion, guys, a bridge version of their thoughts, the important parts.
Eddie: But today we thought we'd shake things up a little bit.
You know, wake up fresh and try something new. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Param Dadia, a physician boarded in obesity medicine, sleep medicine, and integrative medicine. He's speaking on behalf of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
Param: Hello and greetings. How's everyone doing?
Juna: We're doing wonderfully.
We're all well slept. Actually, I'm horribly slept, but we wanted to start off by talking about basically the purpose of sleep, because I think if we think about sleep just logically, it makes no sense, right? Because we're lying down and unable to fight, not reproducing, and not finding food. Like, I feel like it very much does not make evolutionary sense.
So can we first talk about, like, why do we spend so much of our lives sleeping?
Param: Well, I have to smile and say in jest that you're in agreement then with The great Thomas Edison. Edison once said that sleep was nature's mistake and he himself was a wicked insomniac, but he would not call it insomnia. He did a lot of micro sleeps is what he did.
And that can be great for different purposes, but not for health and healing and living the best life. Great question. If there is this seemingly dead time, why do we do this? The magic of sleep is really amazing. It really wasn't until the last 40 years that sleep medicine became real because passively you look at it, it's just as you mentioned, there's nothing going on defenseless, not doing anything productive, but underneath it all, there's so many things that are going on and what we want to be able to appreciate.
It does a lot of things. Number one for health. And that's the reason why I, as a physician, get to talk about this. Sleep is just amazing. If you take a look at every single organ system, there is healing and repair that goes on every single night. Said another way, athletes, these folks that are getting paid millions of dollars are getting paid to recover.
There's a huge part of health that is about recovery. And we do know in order for whether it be about one topic or another, it's head to toe. Let me really even go a little deeper if we can go into the science.
Music: Yes.
Param: American Academy of Sleep Medicine really blossomed 22 ish years ago. There was a famous study called the Sleep Heart Health Study.
Okay. Once they connected sleep to heart health, it was no longer this woo woo topic for those people complaining and belly aching that sleep had nothing to do, right? Number one cause of death and dying in the world that you and I live in is heart health. Heart disease. Yes, anything good for the heart is good for the brain.
So that just begins to help us appreciate every single night we cool down. We know the nervous system does a lot more repair. Surgeries are done at cooler temperatures. From there, all the hormones get a chance to recalibrate, reset. The heart and the brain get a chance, not just for the mechanical functions, but also their endocrine functions.
I could go on and on, but sleep is an antioxidant. It's an anti inflammatory. It resets hunger. It resets the ability for the body to rejuvenate and be active. It really is, in my opinion, and yes, biasly, my opinion, the great connector to all of health.
Eddie: So, so Param, I'm, I'm thinking back to, I don't know, our ancestors out on the savannah, it's been a hard day, you've, you've managed to catch a wildebeest, but, you've
Juna: had a good day of being on a savannah.
Yeah,
Eddie: and you know, you schlepped this thing home, and you cooked up some of this meat, and now I don't know, all the other wild animals are ready to pounce on your leftovers, and then you decide to like, take a nap? I mean, is that, what did other people before our time think about sleep? Because in our society, it's almost A nuisance?
Yeah, a nuisance or, you know, what is it, Frank Zappa, I'll sleep when I'm dead? You know, kind of Right,
Music: yeah.
Eddie: What do you think the perception was before kind of modern times about sleep? Was it just something natural that happened or did they fight it like we do? Yeah,
Param: I will share that there's so much been written about this in different books and also this really kind of emanated from this concept is are we meant to go to sleep, be asleep all night and then pop up without any interruption seven, eight, nine hours later.
Classically a lot of the older discussions have been written about the first sleep and the second sleep and they often talk about sleep being done in different experiences. So sleep really has been a debate and looked out there. Interestingly, the oldest writings are on dreams, a whole nother fun topic.
But when you take a look at sleep, they really thought about it as a time in some of the older writings, again about dreams, is that, you know, the mystics would talk about the gods speaking to them, therefore the dreams and what was going on in that other parallel. And the people that were dreamers, and especially lucid dreamers, were really thought to be divine.
And there were for part of the royal court, part of the military for helping with strategy to be able to create some of these insights. Also interesting about this whole evolutionary conversation, which is really interesting. Some of us on this call, on this conversation, on this chat. morning people and other ones of us are evening people.
Juna: Yeah.
Param: Yours truly I'm an evening person.
Juna: Oh, really?
Param: Yeah. And interestingly, if you leave me to my druthers I'm an evening person, I'm a night owl. I also have a sleep disorder more than one. I didn't have any sleep problems until I started studying it. So warning, anybody listening, you're about to get diagnosed or self diagnosed, all right?
Medical school syndrome. So I have restless leg syndrome and it's classically noted that those of us who have restless legs have low dopamine and we're lower than other individuals. So we tend to have this angst, this ability to move, this ability to want to move. So we were there to guard the fire, to make sure that the village was kind of looked after and those early night hours, and then the morning people would kind of take the baton from us and go from there.
Again, no written record, but it's kind of fun to think about what if that was true.
Eddie: Wow. So this restless leg served a purpose back. Yes, yes. Outside of the cave, because you'd be the dude up all night. Yeah, yeah. I love that. There was
Param: no apps to surf at night, so you just kind of, I guess, you know, check what's going on in and out of the cave.
Eddie: And back to those ancient times, the only cue was really light. Yes. Right? I mean, so how have we perturbed that in our society?
Param: I wish to take a big step back. You know, there used to be the three big pillars of sleep. Quantity, quality, but the third pillar really is rhythm. Better said as the circadian rhythm.
And the reason why I'm bringing that up is it really just hit. The Western medicine literature in the last decade or so. The Nobel Prize was given out roughly five years ago to those that define the circadian rhythm. Now, the reason why I bring that up, it's really intriguing. Whether you believe it was written by the Ayurvedic medicine practitioners or the Chinese medicine practitioners, they talked about the need to have a set bedtime and a set wake up time and, and they talked about the importance of getting sleep before midnight.
Because what they talked about was each of the organs had a different healing cycle. I read this many years ago. And guess what we're finding now in the western literature? That it's true! That's what
Juna: always happens. Isn't that hysterical,
Param: right? So, I
Juna: mean, I
Param: used to tell everybody, like, just get your hours of sleep.
But now I'm like, hey, can you go to bed before midnight? As you can imagine, I lose a lot of friends and I don't get invited to many dinner parties when I talk about some of these conversations because it's not really part of the common world or the social world that you and I are a part of.
Juna: Okay, so I took a sleep and circadian rhythms class in college.
This is why I became very passionate about sleep. Like I'm very, very passionate about sleep. I wear red glasses three hours before bed. It looks ridiculous. Anyways, I bring this up because I didn't realize when we talked about circadian rhythms before I took this class that like your cells actually have internal clocks and there's like a specific part of your brain that actually runs on a 24 hour cycle and keeps the rest of your body running on these cycles and I think like knowing that that literally is happening is such a bigger incentive to like actually follow a sleep schedule because you know when people would say like, oh go to bed early I was kind of like yeah whatever who cares but When I saw these graphs of like how your cells oscillate on the cycle, I was like, oh my god, like this is actually a real thing that your body keeps time for you.
It's crazy.
Param: Unreal. And it's so much fun to, if I may piggyback on what you're saying right there. Because we do know that the brain, in terms of being the master pacemaker, call it the master clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, right, if you want to get really technical about the SCN, that's where light hits basically the back of the eye, goes to the fastest nerve that we can record, and it wakes up the brain.
But there are, as you're getting at, Different parts of the body, and thought to be every single cell of the body, also has its own clock and its own pacemaker as well. And there's obviously the brain and that which, call it the supercomputer, that speaks to it. There was an interesting study many years ago, and it never made sense to me, but it was making the point that light in the bedroom was affecting you.
So even if they gave people shades, meaning more or less some eye mask wear, If they put a light behind the knee, they were able to shift people in terms of circadian rhythm. And I was like, what? A light behind the knee? It must've been the heat. I mean, right. But now we're thinking, right, being in a hot sunny room or in a lighted room.
So there is a conversation where again, going back to what was said, if we're in the cave, we were in darkness. And then we were meant to be able to really be daytime creatures, which really is a hard thing to think about given our 24 7 world that we're now living in.
Juna: Right. So, before we start talking about all the things that disturb sleep, including things that disturb our circadian rhythms, can we get a debrief on like the different phases of sleep?
Like, what are the main phases and what do they each do in sleep? Like how do they function?
Param: Yeah, such an important question. Right on off. Not exactly. And again, it really gets back to the electricity of doing the EEG, the brain waves of the night. And it's really fascinating. So I'm going to give it the big bucket terms and I'll get a little granular.
Just enough to give us some science to it. So we go through these things called light sleep, deep sleep, and dream sleep. Now, they also give them numbers just because in science we like to give things, you know, different routes. We have to. We
Juna: need the numbers.
Param: We need the numbers, right? Yeah. So stage one, stage two.
Stage one is that quasi, it's that twilight. Like if somebody's falling asleep and you shift them like, Hey, what's up? I'm awake. I wasn't sleeping. It's just catching my eye.
Juna: That's my mom in front of the TV when she's watching, like, yeah, you know what I'm saying?
Param: Exactly! So that's that stage one, and it classically happens at the beginning of the night, but it also happens throughout the night because we're known to have a sleep cycle, meaning different stages that happen every 90 to 120 minutes.
So then we fall into stage two now stage two part of stage one and stage two all together is called light sleep When I first heard this I'm like who wants to be a light sleeper. I didn't know what I didn't know So I actually I spent my first set of months learning sleep saying, okay, how do you get rid of this light sleep?
No Light sleep being roughly 60 ish percent of our night is healthy normal garden variety stuff It does a lot of great things But the challenge of it is that it really has been shadowed by stage three sleep. Now there's also technically stage four, but the new nomenclature is condensed stage three and four and just call it three.
So three is deep sleep. Four is deep, deep sleep, which really only happens in teenagers. So now we just comment that it's very deep sleep instead of calling it stage four. Because then as we get older, we don't see stage four and we feel like we're missing out on something. So, and then finally comes the conversation of rapid eye movement, better known as dreams.
But that gets confusing. It's the dreams that are like those movies. Bizarre as they may be, but they kind of have image sound some kind of plot to them or not. But one of the things is we could have dreams and other stages like a little sound, a little fragment, a flash of light, all these different things.
But the dreams as you and I know what for inspiring songs and aha moments and inventions are those rapid eye movements that we are looking at really interesting rapid eye movement. What is the meaning of dreams? No, I'm not going to get into the imagery and interpretation and Freudian Have at it if you want.
That's
Juna: a whole other podcast episode, right? Yes.
Param: Oh gosh, I would love to take a year off and just study dreams. It's fascinating. Especially lucid dreaming, which is, you know, you're in a dream and you can manipulate the dream. Fascinating.
Juna: Yes. Yes. Really cool
Param: stuff. So what we do know is this. We talk about, again, quantity and quality.
Quality is essentially getting sleep time, but really it's going into the getting to sleep stages as well. And so you guys have perhaps heard me say this at what age were we the best sleepers and this gets back to staging
Eddie: this always Makes me laugh when people say oh, I slept like a baby and I'm thinking you woke up every 45 minutes screaming Diaper changed
Juna: For sure teenage right
Param: teen and baby 16 hours to eat sleep poop eat sleep poop But teenagers, what do they do?
They get to sleep They stay asleep. It
Juna: was awesome! Right? I would kill for that sleep quality now, like as an
Param: adult. Well, we can actually talk about not having to kill, but actually get that, so let's see. So what we do know is, what did we do amazingly as teenagers? We got a lot more deep. Call it stage three, four, but that's what we did without even trying, right?
You just did it. Now I want you to know, and as we're here talking about lifestyle medicine and talking about how it's connected, it's so cool for physical, mental, emotional, called spiritual, the way we, the way we move, get our sleep on our stress. It's all intimately connected. So what I wish for us to appreciate is the first half of the night is more deep sleep.
The second half of the night is more dreams. So what goes on? So let me answer that question that was asked. What goes on during sleep? The first half night, you do more of that physical repair, put in growth hormone. You put in proteins that repair the body. You had a good workout. You want to get the full benefit?
Get your sleep.
Music: Yeah.
Eddie: So if you're having trouble following all of the stages of sleep from Dr. Dadia, go to foodweneedtotalk. com where you'll see a beautiful graphic.
Juna: Yes. They're very helpful.
Eddie: Awesome.
Param: Awesome. So you'll see when you see that graphics that you oscillate in and out of different stages, but the first half you get more.
of that deep and the second half of the night you get more of dreams. Now, so many things going on in dreams, but I'm going to be very starchy as a former academic and talk about the limbic system. No need to memorize it. Just remember that's where your emotions get basically stored and you open up and you clear the limbic system every single night in dreams.
Eddie: Can you store your emotions? We know so many people that just release them as soon as they have them.
Param: Well, they think they do, but again, it seems like an endless pit. Right. The guy who cut us off, somebody said something rude to us at all. Negative thought that just won't go away. And if we don't do some of the clearing during the daytime, it will still need to come out.
And therefore the path to least resistance is when you're not distracting yourself from this 24 seven world is that the second half of the night. So here it is, you know, most people talk about sleep disturbances. I want us to think about this because this is the perfect time for me to interject this.
Yes. There's troubles getting to sleep. What's the next big, biggest complaint that I get about sleep. Not snoring but interestingly enough. Hey, man, I get to sleep just fine around 3 4 in the morning I wake up
Juna: right and it gets spinning
Param: and I can't shut it all
Juna: back asleep Yeah,
Param: and what tends to go on is now you paid off your physical exhaustion.
Mm hmm. The mind starts clearing And if you are emotionally puking on yourself and you've all been there, all of a sudden the mind gets spinning. So therefore, one of the greatest things that I want everybody to always learn is whatever mindfulness, whatever breathing, whatever centering technique being present, because it is tough, especially in the set of years we've had with this life we're living.
It's a lot. So sleep is such a big part of get your deep sleep, get your dreams. But what I also will share before we're done talking today is really getting an appreciation that this concept needs to be understood. Your daytime sets up your night and your night sets up the next day. So that's really how I see a huge opportunity for sleep beyond the pills, beyond all these gadgets that we can speak of.
Your way of eating, your way of moving, your way of honoring your mental and emotional health. It's so important to get to sleep, stay asleep and wake up feeling refreshed.
Eddie: So I'm just going to interrupt and we're going to just take a brief break. And then when we come back, we're going to hear more from Parham about exactly what you might want to do during your day to set up a better nighttime.
Music: Um,
Eddie: food we need to talk is funded by a grant from the Aardmoor Institute of Health, the home of full plate living. Full plate living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with. Apples, beans, strawberries, and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes.
Full Plate Living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers, and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at fullplateliving. org.
Juna: We're back. Parum. When we left off, we were talking about how our day sets up our night. And I guess one of our biggest questions for you is, first of all, do we know that people are getting worse quality sleep today because it feels like they are? But I don't actually know if there's data on that. And second of all, what are the biggest things that people are doing in their day that are really serving as, like, disturbances to their later sleep?
And I know you mentioned one of them was Not being mindful. But what are some other ones? Yes.
Param: Now, the great challenge is how do we compare an apple and an orange? Years ago, we don't have the technology we have now. Yet, it's been noted that we basically are sleeping 90 minutes less on average by survey compared to our great grandparents.
So in the last hundred years. Oh my gosh. Now, the one little fun thing to put in there, how does lightbulb Well, Lightbulb is roughly 109, 110 years of age.
Juna: Oh my god.
Param: Alert.
Eddie: Back to Thomas Edison. Okay. Thomas
Juna: Edison ruined our sleep. He was an insomniac and he wanted us to be insomniacs. He wanted
Param: a light to keep him up all night.
Yeah. Born and raised in the state of Michigan. We all went to Edison's lab. Yeah.
Juna: Oh really? Okay, cool. Yeah.
Param: Oh, Thomas. So what we do know is that without question, we have been getting less sleep. So there's again the quantity. And then again, the conversation of quality. Now the quality discussion, again, I want us to tag on to that conversation of daytime sets up night and vice versa.
And the reason I love to really push, I'm not seeing anybody writing about it, speaking about it. It's one of the more passionate statements that I want us to all make. And, you know, I was lucky enough to be a former academic. That landed in sleep, so it gave me a chance to see lifestyle medicine and sleep and as I was learning them together, I said, guys, this all fits.
So I was really lucky to be in the places and spaces and at the scientific meetings that I was. So here's a few thoughts to that, right? Let's think about that deep sleep. Remember the best sleep of all time? Teenagers and their sleep. So what do we know? Deep sleep is basically a conversation of more adenosine in the brain.
So when you put adenosine in an animal model, poor rats and everything else that we study. We shoot up more adenosine. We give them more deep sleep.
Music: Hmm.
Param: So let's think about how do you and I manufacture self manufacture more adenosine. So remember from back in biology class, that stuff called ATP, adenosine triphosphate.
Yes. What happens during the daytime as you burn up more energy, as you are more physically active, what do you have? ATP breaks itself down and you eventually release adenosine. Go from ATP to ADP, AMP, Adenosine. So, we do know is that it's important. Think of it. You've been hiking all weekend, guarding all weekend, helping your friend move, and what do you say Sunday night?
Whew, I'm gonna sleep good tonight. So, there's an important part of having enough physical activity. And think of the world we're living in. Are we getting as much activity as we used to? We don't,
Music: we have remote
Param: controls, whether we're opening our garage door, turning our channels. We don't have to get up nearly as much as we needed to do just a handful of decades ago.
So that's one conversation there. Also, what is something else related to the Denison hypothesis?
Juna: Caffeine! Yes. Sorry. I got excited. I got really excited.
Param: Right? So even though some people who take an Express don't go right to bed, we do know caffeine blocks the ability for adenosine to bind and help to give us that deeper sleep.
So it's something else to think about.
Eddie: And it lasts for how long?
Param: Depending on who you read. Now, we're at really an interesting time of genomics and understanding the liver and the liver genetics. So the standard conversation has been roughly 7 hours to degrade caffeine by 50%. So an 8am cup of java. is a half a cup at 3 p.
m. and at 10 p. m. it's a quarter cup.
Eddie: Which it may be enough to keep some people up?
Param: Might be for some people, and again, if you get that afternoon low, which again is when the circadian rhythm naturally dips, you ask your friends who work as baristas, they're slammed in the morning and they're slammed after lunch.
Music: And then if you get
Param: that afternoon, again, caffeine, little tickle. That unfortunately can really struggle with some people. And again, some people were learning that they're faster metabolizers of caffeine than others. In a handful of years, we'll be knowing everybody's genomics genetics for this. But for the meantime, that is really what we need to think about.
But getting back to that exercise, I always like to impress upon us. Remember, when you work out so hard that you're in pain, does pain help you sleep?
Juna: No. No.
Param: So, please, you know, a little is good, more is better. It's Goldilocks, just the right amount.
Juna: So
Param: we definitely don't want to do too little, too much. We want to honor consistent activity.
A little bit of push and pull, please.
Eddie: What's the wisdom on the type of activity? Is it lifting weights? Is it doing your yoga? Is it going for a brisk walk?
Param: Yeah, a lot of the studies that I've seen has been more related to aerobic activity. And the biggest concern has been the timing. And basically when they have a, what they call more, how should I, uh, recall how they wrote it.
And when it was more vigorous, I believe that's the word they use in literature, vigorous exercise was deemed as basically you could not hold a conversation with someone. In other words, you were working out hard that you would have to be able to take some breaths while you're. Working out,
Eddie: that's the, that's the, that's the talk test.
That's the easy one. Yep. So that's the vigorous. Okay. Yeah.
Param: So not doing that an hour before, but we do know one of the great hypothesis of falling asleep is cooling the body. So they often talk about afternoon activity has been related to better sleep is because you warm up the body and then you slowly cool down coming evening hours.
Another way to kind of move through that is what a lovely nighttime ritual and I love talking about rituals is a warm shower bath before bed. You go into the water, you're warmed up and you come out the ambient air touches you and it slightly cools you. We don't need a shiver but cooling and therefore you don't warm yourself up like when you're exercising which you really get a much more Um, core heat production, but that's something else that it's really lovely.
And great thing about showers and baths is you're not texting, arguing, or doing something that's true.
Juna: Well, speak for yourself. I don't know. Maybe I'll take my phone to the shower and just,
Eddie: and, and you may, you may not know that you and has a thing for cold showers, so I just want to understand that you, I did
Juna: for a bit guys, I did for a bit, I can't do it anymore, but hot showers before bed do sound good.
So cold showers in the morning. So it's
Eddie: the cooling coming out of the shower. That begins the cooling. And then when you're getting into bed, what is the best temperature? And do we need to buy a special mattress to cool ourselves
Param: off? Almost every year, there's a new number put out there and it like, we're going to be talking about numbers.
Aye, aye, aye. And almost every year I get phone calls saying, Oh my gosh. You know, I'm freezing at 68 and I'm like chattering my teeth. And I'm like. It's too cold. So cool, not a number. And what we love to do is we like to publish a number, they take a data set, they find the average number. How many of us like the same food?
How many of us like the same heart? So we really need to appreciate cool rather than a temperature and cold.
Juna: Right. So, okay, we have things that are just probably disturbing our sleep would be not moving a lot, having caffeine. Especially closer to your bedtime, and then, you know, exercising right before bed, not good, being too hot, not good, and all of these things, if they're disturbing your sleep quality and or quantity, can we talk about how they affect your weight and your, like, food behaviors and your movement behaviors, because that's what we talk about a lot on the podcast.
I'm sure our listeners are very interested to find out. Just personally, When I was sleep deprived and I was very stressed at the end of finals, and this could also be the stress, right? Like, obviously it's not just the sleep, but I remember, like, I would never ever, like, eat fries in the dining hall, but when I was sleep deprived, I would come into the dining hall, I could smell the grease, and I was like, it smells so good!
I'm getting fries! And it was like, I was never full, I was always craving, like, really high fat, high sugar food. And when I sleep enough, I feel like so energized and so like ready to eat my normal food. You know what I mean?
Param: Brilliant. Brilliantly laid out. So I'm here with you all as a person who's been 45 to 50 pounds heavier than he is now multiple times in my life.
Very fascinating to me in medical training that I was not going to get formal nutrition, exercise, and That's a whole other fun story to speak for another day. Getting to that, one of the things that I share is, right, I thought to myself, if I could just learn everything about nutrition, everything about exercise, I'm going to have this thing all figured out.
Yeah.
Juna: How many
Param: of us know what to do but don't always do it?
Juna: Yeah, yeah. Then this podcast wouldn't exist, right? Everybody would just be doing the right thing and it wouldn't, yeah.
Param: It's like that great movie, you know, The Matrix. You just put a chip in your download and you know, jiu jitsu all of a sudden.
What we do want to appreciate is the following. It's neurochemistry, craving. The sleepy brain and the stressed out brain neurochemically makes you want what? Sugar, fat, and when do you want it? Now. Now. Sugar, fat, now. Sugar, fat, now. So many people, oh, I just need more willpower. I'm terrible, I'm awful, I'm bleep bleep.
And I'm like, whoa, ease up there. What we do know is willpower has not even come to the conversation. I like to say it's in the next time zone. It is still in bed. It has not arrived yet. So what I want us to appreciate, whether you call it neuropeptide, why, while you're calling it orexin, ghrelin, leptin, there's an alphabet soup out there, but those are raging and want to eat sugar fat now, right?
So please appreciate honoring their stress, honoring their sleep is not a luxury. And on top of that, let's go one more step into the hormones. Every single night you make growth hormone, you make testosterone. What do you feel like doing if you have low growth hormone, testosterone, do you want to push, pull, hike, bike?
No. Tomorrow. Monday. No, after that big thing we gotta finish, then we'll get right on it.
Music: Right, right.
Param: So I want to appreciate that, because it's not, again, that we don't want to, but if we do not get regenerated, and on top of that, want us to appreciate, how positive are we when we're exhausted and tired?
Juna: Oh my god, so negative.
Eddie: But the regeneration that goes on, is that back to the quantity of sleep or the quality of sleep or all of the above? All of the above. Quantity, quality,
Param: and the rhythm. Because we do know the body loves habits, it loves cycles. And, you know, there's 24 7 world jet setting, as we do. It's hard.
Juna: So these like eating behaviors and exercise behaviors, I guess they're kind of, the direction goes both ways in terms of the relationship, right?
Like eating poorly kind of messes up your sleep. Yeah. But then also bad sleep messes up your eating. And it's like this like feedback loop. You know what I mean? Because when you eat too much, you also can't really sleep that well. Like you feel horrible.
Param: There was a study, and I never saw it published, but it was presented, people who ate more real food, as we would call whole food based, they tended to burn up more energy because they didn't have the sugar swings, the insulin swings that they would have.
So eating basically more of that healthy, balanced, traditional great grandma's kitchen kind of food would definitely allow us to have more ATP, more energy burn, help us with that. Nighttime eating, remember the old English proverb, you know, king for breakfast, you know, a queen for lunch and a pauper for dinner.
We tend to have so much bigger meals at nighttime. And again, there's intermittent fasting, which it's really interesting. One of my dear colleagues, brilliant behavioral psychologist. And he says, you know what? I have a really good track record in one or two sessions of helping people sleep better. I'm like, really?
What are you doing? He goes, I restart breakfast. I'm like, whoa, what? And he says, well, think of it. He says, if people are not having that cue that it's morning time, I need my energy. Right? And we can debate over time what does that mean with intermittent fasting, but I really think it's intriguing when you can help people understand that.
And again, not to use these other ways of energizing ourselves with caffeine and, you know, carb loading ourself to just get through the next hour.
Eddie: So, you volunteered a couple of minutes ago about having had significant weight fluctuations, personally. As you think back to what was, led to your success in losing weight, how much, like, where does the sleep come into it versus the, the above, or was it all All at once,
Param: you know, I'll share this first and foremost.
It was the aha moment of nutrition matters Movement matters, right? So with that came my oscillations of 40 and 45 pounds went down to oscillations of 30 ish pounds And then from there, you know being on call not being on call. I mean all those things It wasn't really until I got out of that crazy loop and then, you know, this aha of lifestyle medicine kind of came through that I was able to now stabilize my weight and get it down to that next level of 20 ish pounds and whatnot, kind of fluctuating.
And then when it came through of much more realizing that me and my little popcorn like monkey brain, I really needed to get into some practice of stillness, some practice of mindfulness. So I look back that it was different layers of this lifestyle. medicine that really was helpful for me to be able to now oscillate less.
Eddie: It sounds like an evolution and I'm sort of seeing the waves come where you're, you're, you're not going up as high, you're not coming down as low perhaps. Well said.
Juna: That's actually really interesting because I've also seen studies on people who are in a calorie deficit and they'll compare people who get less sleep on the same calorie deficit as people who get more sleep.
So just for our listeners, as a reminder, Uh, being in a calorie deficit means you are eating less calories than you're burning, which should physiologically, you know, cause weight loss. And you would think it would cause the same amount of weight loss in both people, because they're in the same calorie deficit.
And basically, the people that sleep more lost like a pound on average more a week, just because they were sleeping an hour and a half more a day. So it seems like Sleep is really, really important. If you're, especially if you're like an athlete and you need to recover, or if you're a person that is like watching their nutrition or making nutrition changes, like sleep is just as important as everything else you're doing in your day.
Param: And if I can add one more thing to that study, and I believe it was either that same study or it was a corollary that we do know that when somebody was basically with that conversation of calorie, but when people underslept, they lost more muscle mass. Because, wow. Yes, yes, they
Juna: lost more lean body mass.
Param: Right? And then what happens to metabolism when you have less lean mass?
Juna: Slows down! Right? So guys, if you remember back to our metabolism episode, if you go back and listen to our episode with Dr. Herman Ponser, you'll remember that your lean body mass is one of the most important determinants of your metabolism.
And if you're ever in a calorie deficit, we want to make sure that the weight you're losing is as high of a percentage fat as possible and low percentage muscle as possible to maintain your metabolism as you lose weight. And it's just like Param said, like, The less people slept, the more muscle they lost versus fat.
Eddie: So Parham, here's a phenomena that I was seeing with great regularity in my house. One of my 20 something children who was remarkably getting up at 7 a. m. for work, Monday through Friday. Amazing. Would go to Hawaii every weekend, which is about five time zones removed from east coast of the United States.
Waking up, without an alarm, at noon.
Juna: So, figuratively go to Hawaii. He wasn't flying to Hawaii every weekend. His sleep schedule was going to Hawaii. Which
Eddie: seemed fine until Monday morning came around and then had a Fly home, so to speak, and it was just, uh, it was, it was not pretty by Monday morning trying to, so can you talk a little bit about what I understand is social jet lag?
Param: Absolutely. And let me share one size doesn't fit all. There's some people that can be able to switch their schedules better than other people. And obviously, biasly, I tend to see people who. Essentially, are more challenged with their sleep. So I'm really much more asking them to keep their schedules similar during the weekday and the weekend.
Mm hmm. So, we do know, again, we want to be a part of the world. We don't want to miss out, and I get that completely. But going beyond that, one of the things that I want everybody to appreciate is that if I'm hearing somebody on the weekend sleeping in and not having an alarm clock, that begs me to think about what's happening during the weekday.
Are you getting the quantity and quality of sleep? And are you, again, being that great student, being that great, Family member that employee and learn to suck it up and then finally give yourself that chance to do the recovery on the weekends And of course, you know a lot of things are happening in the evenings after Friday night when people get off work We want to be able to decompress It is one of those things without question.
We know that the body can figure out itself one ish hours or so So if you normally are Shifting your clock by one hour, the body kind of does that really relatively well. When you get to two plus, that's when it starts to slip. And then that, you know, conversation, and I love how you put it from, you know, the East coast to Hawaii, that five hour shift, we would prefer people not to do that, but we do know it without question people have and will.
And just knowing that long term, that's not going to be sustainable.
Eddie: So I don't have to wake him up at 7 a. m. on Saturday morning? Well, if you need me to, I can write it on a prescription for you.
Param: I'm
Eddie: just teasing. Ah, there it
Param: is. Dr. Tedious.
Juna: Yes. So, talking about getting good sleep during the week. Can we talk about some things we can do to actually, actively improve our sleep quality?
And I know you're very passionate about rituals. Yes. And. Using your day to set up your night. So let's talk about some of the things we can proactively do.
Param: Beautiful. So let's talk about from the time we wake up. We want to make sure that we appreciate that as we can have a set wake up time. So important.
Many people talk about a bedtime. You can't force yourself to go to sleep with some displeasure, you can force yourself to wake up. And the reason why that's important is that it's one of the greatest ways to help set the circadian because when you do that, then you would give yourself a chance to be sleepier at an early time, but then you have to be consistent with it, which again, if you're not having good sleep, meaning a sleep of quantity, quality, and that have a rhythm.
People might fight it, but those people that work with me that really stick to that wake up time, they phenomenally do much better. As already mentioned, somebody not sleeping well, have breakfast. You don't need to eat Denny's Grand Slam, I'm not endorsing that at all, but something, some nourishment, and please, you know, get all the nutrients in, not just a carb load.
Get your nutrients and make it yummy. Life needs to be enjoyed. Get into the light, get some sun, get some shine if you're not in a place like that. Honor the light boxes of the world. You don't need to stare at it. Heaven knows my ophthalmology friends don't want you doing that, but even having it next to your side and having it in your presence, it's going to be very, very important.
Eddie: And is that an early morning thing to do?
Param: It is great to do it in the, and within the first, you know, set of hours in the morning, first couple of hours. Yeah. Very great. Thank you for. slowing that in and bringing that in beyond that. The other thing that I think would be really important for everyone is to get some movement.
And again, I know that for myself, I'm not a hospital physician anymore. I'm not walking up and downstairs anymore. I'm not walking from one wing to the other wing. But whatever we can do to get more movement in, it's so important, you know, give yourself that stretch break, sitting at the computer rotating in, please give yourself a chance to take that break.
What we also Eddie's
Juna: bike desk. Eddie has a bike desk where he bikes and he works. And that's how he does his meetings, too. Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh.
Eddie: They, they persuaded me not to bring it into the studio. We
Juna: just hear pedaling the whole time.
Eddie: And huffing and puffing. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I wanted to share with you, my wife and I went off for a yoga retreat, uh, there's a lovely place in Massachusetts, Kripalu, and did all sorts of different yoga, and the most challenging yoga for me was called Yoga Nidra, and the only instruction As they went through this process was to not fall asleep, and I failed miserably.
Param: Right? Now let me share with you, we call that paradoxical intention.
Eddie: So if I told
Param: half of the people listening, You've got to stay up, you've got to stay up, you've got to stay up. Another half, fall asleep, fall asleep, you've got to fall asleep. Guess what would happen? Universally, the opposite. So interesting how the brain, we, we program and almost seemingly give ourselves the ipsilateral, the opposite of what's going on.
So it is. Like teenagers. Right. Like
Eddie: teenagers.
Param: That's so
Juna: true. Cause I've been stressed out about trying to fall asleep because I know I need more sleep recently and I feel like I stay up so late because I'm paranoid about not sleeping and it's like, anyways, I think that's a good transition to talking about our nighttime rituals, which I think is what you were going to get to next.
Yes,
Param: and the last part of the morning, if you're going to enjoy your caffeine, keep it in the morning hours. It's
Juna: coffee, tea, great
Param: antioxidants. You know, those other colas and other energy drinks, even if they're fortified with B vitamins. But keep your caffeine to the earlier hours and then, yes, taper into the night.
It is so amazing, right? We want to go, go, go and then suddenly stop and fall into sleep.
Juna: Just pass out.
Param: Right. And I understand why that would be what people want, but that's not what really is helpful. And again, so many of us, you know, want to be able to be a part of everything. Yours truly is involved in that as well.
So if I can just. Push one more hour to get a little bit more work done. You know, the family's sleeping now. I can get some work done. We do need to give ourselves permission. First, second, and third. Give yourselves permission. And not only physical, the mental and emotional. We go through and we honor our great families, our great companies, our great societies.
What we do know is, usually at the end of the day, people want me time. Now, it's not an easy sell on my part, but the ultimate me time is sleep time. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, call it spiritual, it is so important. But what I want people to appreciate is finding that me time, and I love to talk about it as almost a ritual, almost spa like.
Really, we talked about a shower, a bath, so let's mimic nature every single night. What happens outside? Cool, comfortable, dark, and quiet. So if you go into that shower bath, dim the lights, put on candles, give yourself some smells, some aromas that you're like, Oh. You know, this essential oil stuff, I thought it was just nice and kind of, you know, cute.
As I've studied more of this, I'm like, wait, there's actually, you know, some real chemistry here that we need to be able to take a look at. And everyone says, Oh, it's got to be lavender. It's got to be like, no, find the smell that you find. I think some people love lavender. Some people tell me it stinks and they're both right.
You've got to find what resonates with you. So go find those bath gels, those salts, those candles that just really give you that. Ah, and what else though, put on some soft music, something that's soothing. What I would love people to do is to get, you know, that towel, get that pajama pair on that really makes you look forward to the night.
When you get into your bedroom, remember, the bed is for two things. For sex and sleep. And that's it. It's not for thinking, working, iPad surfing, telling your bed partner they're wrong and you're right. That's hardly going to work any time of the hour, let alone right when you're trying to fall asleep. You really would want to appreciate that the bed needs to be a place, a sanctuary in your bedroom.
We know this from all these movements of decluttering. When your surroundings are cluttered, you're cluttered. So whatever you can do, put the world behind you. Start to taper, do some of these rituals, soft music, some yoga, stretch, that warm shower bath. But my favorite is breath work and wow, you know, I'm of.
Asian, Indian descent, born and raised in Michigan. To give me culture, my parents put me in front of yogis whenever they would come to Detroit. Um, to say the least, the yogis would kick me out because I was a squirrelly kid, restless legs, even during the daytime, I guess. And all I knew about mindfulness meditation was I stunk at it.
I was terrible.
Juna: Same.
Param: And I, you know, I talk about this with almost everyone and almost universally, I was like, oh, can't do it. I stink at it. I'm like, yeah. You're human. This isn't natural and this is a reason why we need to practice this and it's so important and what I want people to appreciate is creating that stillness like that yoga nidra.
The goal of yoga nidra isn't to fall asleep but what are we using yoga nidra for? Sleep, it's hysterical, but it's that ability. Here's a fun little next bit of trivia. When you take a look at brainwaves, one of the things we do to calibrate the sleep study every night that we start it, is we have people open their eyes and close their eyes.
And what do we know? When you close the eyes, still awake, but close eyes, you see the brainwave slow down a little bit.
Music: Oh, so
Eddie: some of that answer is, I guess, part of my question, which is if you were to just lie still as my memory of yoga nidra before I fell asleep in the first five minutes, just lying still closing your eyes, is that provide some portion of the restorative aspects of sleep?
Param: Yeah, it does help. Now, is it sleep? It's not sleep. But it's going to help you move in the direction of sleep. Um, you know, it's one of the funniest things one time I was given a talk and somebody stopped me a week later and said, Oh, that was great. And I said, well, tell me what was great. They said, I followed your recommendation.
I'm like, um, I usually tell people a lot of things. What did you follow? I closed my eyes. It helped. And I was like, what?
Music: Okay.
Param: I love it because it just gives us permission again, that if we don't give ourselves that ability to rest, and again, if you fall asleep, right, if not, you're resting. And one of the great things is not trying to fight yourself.
You know, this push pull life we live in, that's not going to help us sleep. So I just, you know, I love this whole episode that we're putting together because it gives people a chance to come back, you know, listen to this, listen to it again. And here at this point in your time, Hercletitus, the famous Greek philosopher, no man, woman steps in the same river twice.
We're evolving. The world around us is evolving. So anything that anybody listening is hearing, come back to it every once in a while. What resonates with you today may be different a little bit later. The biggest thing, one of my favorite writers that I love to paraphrase is Emerson. Methods are many.
Principles are very few. The man woman chasing methods may or may not find it. A person with principles will find a helpful method. So, we do know lean mass, eating real food, slowing down physically, mentally, and emotionally. These are principles, and you'll find the right method. But, Honor, the few things that you're hearing in this episode and any others, take away those principles, please, please.
Eddie: One thing I'm smiling at, Yuna, is that I've heard, I've heard, not ours, obviously, that some people listen to podcasts to fall asleep.
Juna: That's me, Parra. I'm sorry. I hope this
Param: podcast puts people to sleep, right? Isn't that the
Juna: whole part of it? That's exactly right.
Param: Thank you. Hopefully nobody's driving right now.
So sorry.
Juna: Well, I think that's a great place to end the episode on. Thank you so much, Dr. Param Dadia, for being our first live interview guest. This was so fun.
Eddie: Thank you very much for, for your wisdom and for the way that you've presented it. And I feel like I have more permission to take better care of myself, and I really appreciate your granting me that permission.
So thank you.
Param: I'm honored. Thank you all. And to everyone listening, wishing you a great night, deep sleep and sweet dreams. Thank you. Thank you.
Juna: Thank you so much for listening and potentially falling asleep to today's episode, which I will allow on this episode because sleep is very important. You can find all of our show notes at our website, foodweneedtotalk.
com. You can find us on Instagram at foodweenet. Food, we need to talk. You can find me on Instagram at the official Yuna and Yuna Jada on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie.
Eddie: Trying to get to sleep on time tonight.
Juna: Okay. Yes. Okay. Eddie is going to be on a good schedule. Me too, guys. I'm going to try to get to sleep on time tonight too.
Food, we need to talk is a production of PRX.
Eddie: Our producers are Morgan Flannery and Rebecca Seidel.
Juna: Our mix engineer is Tommy Bazarian.
Eddie: Jocelyn Gonzalez is executive producer of PRX Productions.
Juna: Food, We Need to Talk was co created by Kerry Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips, and me.
Eddie: Remember, for any personal health questions, contact your health provider.
Juna: Thanks for listening! And not falling asleep.
