Shift workers perform essential duties in industries that make our world comfortably function on a 24/7 basis.  That said, shift workers pay a high price with their health.  A major health problem with shift workers is weight gain.  As a result, learning effective weight management is critical for a healthy shift worker. 

Having worked rotating shift since 2014, let me tell you that each shift worker is different. A lucky few might not gain much of anything; others only gain a few pounds, while others double their weight.   Weight gain is much more than a vanity issue; significant weight gain can lead to obesity and obesity opens the floodgates to a variety of other health issues.  

The human body isn’t designed to carry a lot of excess weight.  Excess weight puts a lot more wear and tear on the joints, especially the hips and knees.  In addition to orthopedic issues, unchecked weight gain can cause cardiovascular issues such as elevated blood lipids, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and diabetes.

How Shift Work Impacts Weight

The human body is designed to sleep at night and be awake during the daytime.  Sleep is when the body goes into repair mode.  A variety of important biological functions occur such as hormone regulation and the conversion of food into energy.  Disrupting your body’s natural circadian cycle by working night shift or rotating shift will disrupt these processes and throw the body’s systems into disarray.  Bottom line, the root cause of all your problems as a shift worker is a disrupted circadian cycle.

It’s Not Your Fault, It’s Your Circadian Cycle

One of the many problems caused by shift work are low melatonin levels.  Melatonin is a hormone that controls the circadian cycle, modulates immune response, body temperature and inhibits hunger. It is produced at night when we are asleep.  When your sleep cycles are constantly disrupted by shift work, your natural levels of melatonin are going to be affected.  

Another problem caused by disrupted circadian cycles is abnormal levels of hunger hormones.  Shift workers have elevated levels of ghrelin, a hormone that activates hunger, and depressed levels of leptin, a hunger suppression hormone.  A natural response to this imbalance is to reach for foods that are high in sugar to wake you up as well as fat and salt to satisfy your hunger. Because your hunger hormones are out of balance, you’re more likely to eat high calorie, high sugar, and high fat content foods at greater frequencies and in larger portions.  Weight gain is always going to be the result. 

Remember when I said that sleeping is when the body turns food into fuel?  Insufficient sleep from a disrupted circadian cycle affects the body’s ability to turn glucose into fuel, resulting in free, unused glucose floating around in the blood.  This can result in insulin resistance and later, Type 2 diabetes.  Sleep deprivation can also result in free fatty acids in the blood; this is often a precursor to pre-diabetes. 

As if imbalances in melatonin and hunger hormones aren’t enough, shift workers also have depressed levels of the feel-good hormones serotonin and dopamine.  As a result, shift workers gravitate towards foods that are sweet, calorie dense and comforting.

Nutrition, Meal Timing and Portion Control

As shift workers, we can’t control the hormonal imbalances caused by our disrupted sleep cycles, but we can control other factors such as our nutrition, meal timing, and portion control.

Having worked rotating shift since 2014, the biggest make or break factor in my ability to work the hours I work is the quality of my nutrition.  High quality, nourishing home cooked meals work the best towards powering me through my shift, followed by meal timing and portion control.  A few of these meals were painstakingly made, others were thrown together last minute, but a majority were leftovers.  A common thread of all my home cooked meals that helped me power through 12-hour shifts is that I knew exactly what was in them.  I knew the nutritional breakdown and the calorie content and, even better, it was cheap.  I don’t know about you, but I love cheap, easy, and healthy.  

Calorie and Macronutrient Tracking

Tracking calories and macronutrients isn’t my favorite activity.  I find it to be very tedious as a matter of fact, but it’s the best way to keep yourself accountable.  Tracking your food intake helps to properly portion out meals and snacks. Nutritional labels and many recipes have the number of calories, and grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates.  There are multiple apps available that track everything for you, all you do is enter some numbers and the app tallies up calories and macronutrients.  How easy is that?  

There is the old expression “Ignorance is bliss”; let me tell you, tracking your food intake by logging the calories and macronutrients removes all ignorance and tells you if you’re eating enough, if you’re eating too much and if you’re eating the right foods.  It also tells you if you need to readjust.  Calculator.net has a personalized calorie calculator.  All you need to do is enter some basic information and it will calculate you daily calorie needs for maintenance and weight loss.  How easy is that?

Exercise Strategies For Irregular Schedules

Another factor we can control is our fitness.  Effective exercise strategies go a long way to counter the effects of rotating shift or night shift.  Fitness is a very personal thing, some shift workers prefer light activity, others workout hard and often.  What is important is to get the body moving 30 or more minutes a day.  

Working out exercises the heart, lungs, muscles, and it makes you feel better and more alert and energized.  Many workplaces offer discounts to gyms in their health plan.  There are 24 hour gyms to accommodate unconventional schedules.  

Garage gyms have become very popular because your gym is literally right there in your home so there is no excuse to not workout.  Also, there are thousands of fitness apps for all ages and fitness levels.  What is easier and more convenient than having a ready-made workout on your phone or tablet that you can do at home?  

Burn Even More Calories

Weightlifting involving progressive resistance builds lean muscles.  More lean muscle mass increases metabolic rate and is an effective hedge against body fat gain.  Look at muscle mass like you would look at the engine of a car.  An eight-cylinder pickup truck is going to use a lot more fuel than a four-cylinder compact car.  More muscle mass translates out to a higher metabolic rate even at rest so get out there and pump iron.  Ladies, don’t be afraid of muscle mass, muscles are your friend.  Unless you’re abusing anabolic steroids, something you should NEVER do, you will never get a burly man’s body.

 Ugh! What Do I Do Now? 

Chances are, if you are reading this article, you gained weight and you’re wondering how you’re going to lose it.  First, don’t beat yourself up over it. You didn’t gain the weight overnight; you’re not going to lose it overnight.  

If you work night shift or rotating shift, you can’t help that your hunger hormones are in disarray, but you do need to reflect on what you did to gain that weight.  Be very honest with yourself.  What are you eating and why are you eating?  Are you eating processed junk food? Are you drinking sodas or sugary coffee drinks?  We all have a well-meaning saboteur of a coworker that brings in pizza or sweets.  Are you partaking in the treats saboteur coworker brings?  Are you an emotional eater? Do you eat out of boredom or habit?  People with desk jobs often eat just to eat.  Don’t do that; be very mindful of what you eat, when you eat and how much you eat.  Space your meals and snacking and keep snacking to low calorie, healthy foods.

Understand the Difference Between Hunger and Cravings

Listen to your body.  Are you actually hungry or are you bored and just want to sink your teeth into something?  There is a difference between wanting to eat something and being hungry.  Tracking your nutrition and when you enjoy your meals and snacks is a great way to keep yourself accountable.  Prep your meals ahead of time.  Make your meals out of healthy nutritios foods.  Pack healthy, low-calorie snacks. 

Have an Accountability Partner

Don’t touch the goodies the saboteur co-worker brings.  When offered, politely decline, and say that you’re trying to improve your eating habits.  Chances are, you have another co-worker that also wants to clean up their eating habits and lose a few pounds.  Healthy eating buddies make the best accountability partners.  Many workplaces have wellness incentives where you can earn a little extra money or gift cards if you quit smoking or lose excess weight.  What better incentive to clean up your lifestyle than a little extra money?   

Pay Attention to Your Body

I’m not a big fan of scales because they show a number, they don’t reflect lean muscle mass vs. fat mass.  You can be eating healthy and working out and gaining lean muscle mass and the scale might not move or it could show weight gain.  Likewise, you can be losing lean muscle mass and the scale will show weight loss.  Look at other factors besides the scale.  How are your clothes fitting on you?  Compare how you look now vs. how you looked six, or twelve weeks ago?  How do you feel?  

GLP-1 Drugs

Before I go into my own story of weight management while working shift, I feel that I need to mention GLP-1 drugs because of the easy availability and the way they are being promoted.  Glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists initially started off as medication to manage Type 2 diabetes.  Without going into the pharmacology weeds, GLP-1 drugs work by lowering blood sugar levels and promote a feeling of satiety.  A side effect of GLP-1 use was weight loss; the manufacturer immediately saw dollar signs and pushed to make it available for off label use.  Off label use for weight loss was initially so expensive, that only the Hollywood crowd and the very affluent could afford it for weight loss.  Now, it’s available to anyone who wants to use it, and it’s much cheaper.  Like any medication, there are pros and cons to taking it.

GLP-1 Pros

1. Substantial weight loss.  If you need to lose a lot of weight, GLP-1 drugs are effective.  I have a co-worker that lost 90 pounds and counting on Zepbound.  She has gone from a size 20 to a size 10.
2. Reduced cravings.  These drugs mimic hormones that influence the satiety centers of the brain by reducing cravings.  Shift workers are notorious for craving unhealthy, calorie rich foods. 
3. Improved bio-marker levels.  Blood sugar biomarkers, insulin resistance, blood lipids and blood pressure are reduced.  

GLP-1 Cons

1. Digestive system distress such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and constipation is very common.  I had a coworker that got violently ill when she was on Wegovy, she couldn’t keep anything down.
2. Muscle, bone and facial volume loss are part of the weight loss, not just unwanted body fat.  Plastic surgeons and estheticians now offer treatments for the loss of facial volume and firmness. 
3. There is no exit plan, getting off GLP-1 drugs often leads to weight regain.
4.  GLP-1 drugs aren’t a substitute for exercise, breaking bad habits and adopting healthy eating.
5. GLP-1 drugs are still expensive.  

It’s All About You

The decision to take GLP-1 drugs or not is a very personal one.  What might work on one person, won’t work on another.  This is a conversation that needs to be had with your doctor.  I know we’re all busy, but this is a matter that needs the kind of medical supervision you get from your health care provider, not from an online pharmacy. 

The Slippery Slope

My own history of shift work related weight gain and eventual loss began with permissiveness over what I ate.  I work out a lot, so I developed an attitude of calories are meant to be enjoyed and not counted.  Besides, I work out a lot, I’m going to burn them off, right? Wrong!  You can’t out train a bad diet.  By bad diet, I helped myself to the big bag of Doritos that a coworker brought in on a regular basis.  If someone brought a box of cookies in, I helped myself.  When pizza was brough in, I helped myself.  Five-dollar calzone night?  Absolutely! 

I descended a slippery slope of weight gain.  Five pounds became ten pounds.  Ten pounds became fifteen pounds.  Fifteen pounds was becoming twenty when I realized that I had a problem that needed to be remedied.  My clothes were starting to not fit me, and I wasn’t going to buy new clothes. Even worse, the processed garbage I was helping myself to was making it difficult to get through my long shifts.  It was time to get my act together right now!

My Story

I didn’t gain nearly 20 pounds overnight, so I wasn’t going to lose it overnight.  I got an accountability partner that also had the same goals as I had and I followed an intermittent fast cycle of 16 hours of no food, followed by an eight-hour window of only nutritious meals.  No, I didn’t eat for eight hours straight; I allotted myself two healthy, well rounded meals and a few low calorie snacks in between. 

Consistency is Key

Whether I worked day shift, night shift or I was off, I made sure I stayed consistent.  I started each day with a cup of Bulletproof coffee.  I didn’t eat breakfast or anything for several hours.  My meals that were lunch and dinner were healthy, low-calorie meals that were easily prepped ahead of time.  Any snacking in between meals was only low calorie, healthy foods and I allowed myself one square of dark chocolate at the end of the day.  

I continued to do my same my same workouts, but after a 12-hour day shift, I made sure I did a gentle but effective workout.  A more gentle workout is better than no workout, right?  

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

After a few weeks I started noticing a difference.  My clothes weren’t as tight, and the scale was going down.  After a few more weeks, the scale went down some more and I could see the difference.  Eight months after I decided I needed to make some changes, I was down 20 pounds.  My body was visibly leaner and the clothes that used to be tight on me were loose.  

Everybody is different; people lose excess weight at a different pace.  Eight months may seem like a long time to lose 20 pounds, but bad habits take time to undo and slow and steady wins the race.