The four pieces of the weight loss puzzle. Which one needs a little more love in your life?

A very talented friend of mine, photographer (and occasional Hollywood trainer) Clay Enos created this graph illustrating the four pieces of the weight loss puzzle. Frustrated from eating right but not losing weight? Hitting the gym every week but not seeing results? Well, as this graph clearly illustrates, we are a system of systems. We function synergistically. Overly challenging workouts with no nutritional work doesn’t get results. Not sleeping and getting up too early to exercise doesn’t get results. Eating right but chronically stressing doesn’t get results. So what does?

As the graph says, it all starts with sleep. Some of you might be surprised to see sleep as the number one most important component when it comes to losing weight. But it’s a fact: getting enough sleep (and the right kind of sleep) is the most significant, the easiest and the cheapest thing you can do to lose weight, gain muscle and reverse the signs of aging. So get to bed as close to 10pm as possible and try to get no less than 8 hours of sleep per night. Remember, getting poor sleep for even just a few nights puts you into a prediabetic state. Your blood-sugar levels sky-rocket, your body creates less leptin (the hormone responsible for regulating appetite – leaving you craving carbs and sugar) and your body begins to pile on the pounds.

But in order to manage your sleep you have to manage your stress. Although they seem to be opposing conditions, chronic stress, which makes you fatigued throughout the day, is actually linked with the inability to fall asleep at night. The common link between the two is cortisol. Because one of the roles of cortisol is to make us more alert, any stress after roughly 8pm will negatively affect your sleep quality. So make sure you avoid email, television and even stressful conversations after 8pm to ensure not only that you can fall asleep, but also that your stress levels have a chance to dissipate while you are at rest.

This brings us to the nutrition piece of the fat loss puzzle. When you sleep right and stress right, the chances are pretty darn high that you’re also going to eat right. Because lack of sleep and too much stress both cause insulin resistance and fat storage, when you’re well rested and managing your stress, you are much more likely to make smarter nutrition choices. And, because your hormones aren't all out of sync, you'll also be much better equipped to digest and process the food you choose to eat. Are you drinking ½ your body weight in clean ounces of water daily? Are you putting two hours between dinner and the time your head hits the pillow? Are you rotating different foods into your diet for nutrient diversity? Are you living by the 80/20 rule (eat right 80% of the time and your body can handle the other 20% when you’re less than ideal) or is it more like the 50/50 rule? All of these seemingly simple details hugely impact your sleep quality, your capacity to manage stress and your body’s ability to put on lean muscle mass and burn body fat.

Which leads us to the final piece of the weight loss puzzle: Exercise. Some of you might be shocked to see exercise listed as the least important (albeit most complicated) piece of the weight loss puzzle. While exercise is an incredibly important part of a healthy lifestyle, it’s almost irrelevant if the other three pieces (sleep, stress, nutrition) aren’t in line. Exercising is where most people start when they want to lose weight and unfortunately, it’s where 99% of them get stuck: putting in hour upon hour at the gym, not seeing results. Working out hard when you’re overly tired, overly stressed and eating crap will do nothing for your body. But the right exercises in the right doses can do amazing things for your body. In fact, adding just a single pound of new muscle to your body means that you will burn an extra 50 calories each day. Put that over the course of a year, and it’s the equivalent of burning five pounds of body fat every year. So in that way, if you add just five pounds of new muscle to your body, you’re looking at an incredible 25 pounds of fat loss. But in order to be able to create lean muscle mass, you have to be getting good sleep, managing your cortisol and eating clean.

Remember: you can’t lose weight to get healthy. You have to get healthy to lose weight. Start today by getting a good night’s sleep…and set the stage for the other puzzle pieces to fall into place.