How Would You Like to Burn Fat as You Sleep?

Nighttime fat burners claim to burn fat as you dream away. While there's plenty of ads to make you wonder, many of them are misleading and the products rarely work. But can you burn fat as you sleep?
How Would You Like to Burn Fat as You Sleep?

Last update: 30 December, 2019

When people start a weight-loss journey, most of them don’t see it as a lifestyle change but rather, a strict diet. And that’s the first fatal flaw. People frequently look for effortless ways to burn fat. In our post today, we want to take a closer look at how to burn fat as you sleep and if it can really offer weight-loss results.

Can you burn fat as you sleep?

In order to understand the possibility of burning fat while sleeping, we first have to understand how the body loses fat. Fat is a substance that’s stored in the body. It serves as a long-term energy source. In order to lose it, we need to use up energy.

Ingesting fewer calories than we need is the only way to make out body need energy. In other words, you have to create a caloric deficit. By maintaining a caloric deficit, your body turns to its reserve energy sources, thus burning away your fat.

That’s precisely why many weight-loss diets restrict high-calories foods, replacing them with low-calorie foods such as vegetables.

nighttime fat burners how

Nighttime fat burners: burn fat as you sleep

Now, let’s talk about the body’s ability to burn fat as you sleep. An important factor here is the body’s basal metabolic rate. The basal metabolic rate is the number of calories the body burns simply to stay alive, or at rest.

So, we can say that the basal metabolic rate is the energy that the body needs to use in order to maintain the muscles, digest, breathe and keep the heart pumping.

Each person has a different rate and certain tissues consume more energy than others. For example, a person with a muscular frame will have a higher basal metabolic rate because muscle is a very demanding tissue. Furthermore, the rate can change throughout the day.

As you sleep, your body continues burning calories; however, the metabolic rate slows down just as with heart rate, breathing, and all the bodily processes.

But even though the body has a slower metabolic rate at night, if there’s a calorie deficit, it indeed can burn fat as you sleep just as it does during the day.

Ways to burn fat as you sleep

Before we continue, we want to highlight that it’s impossible to burn off fat without a proper diet and an active lifestyle that would cause a calorie deficiency.

None of the ads you see on fat-reducing creams and pills actually work. At most, they can work as a complementary treatment to a good diet. Now, let’s look at the ways you can burn fat as you sleep.

1. Sleep more

If might seem contradictory at first, especially after reading that the body burns less as is rests, but hear us out. Yes, the body burns less as you sleep but a good night’s sleep and the adequate hours will help your body synthesize hormones properly. These might include the growth hormone, sex hormones, and cortisol.

The hormones help the body carry out lipolysis in addition to increasing the basal metabolic rate throughout the entire day. Thus, sleeping is essential for burning fat.

burn fat sleep essential

2. High-intensity exercise: burn fat as you sleep

High-intensity exercise– which includes programs such as functional training, CrossFit and HIIT— makes your body crave oxygen, which helps, in turn, burn fat because your body consumes more oxygen after the workout. This process is known as EPOC.

3. Thermogenic supplements

Lastly, you can also find supplements that might help increase your basal metabolic rate. Thermogenic supplements work by increasing body temperature.

However, most of these supplements make it difficult to sleep as they contain stimulants such as caffeine or theine, which usually come from red or green tea extract. However, you can also find options that don’t use stimulants but work to increase the body’s calorie burn as well.


All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.


  • Nedeltcheva A V., Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Schoeller DA, Penev PD. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Ann. Intern. Med. 2010;153(7):435.
  • Strasser B, Spreitzer A, Haber P. Fat loss depends on energy deficit only, independently of the method for weight loss. Ann. Nutr. Metab. 2007 Dec;51(5):428–32.
  • Chaput JP, Tremblay A. Adequate sleep to improve the treatment of obesity. Vol. 184, CMAJ. Canadian Medical Association; 2012. p. 1975–6.

This text is provided for informational purposes only and does not replace consultation with a professional. If in doubt, consult your specialist.