Want the Best Sleep of Your Life?

You can’t beat a good night’s sleep. Few people understand this quite as well Shawn Stevenson, who is a testament to the powerful role that sleep can play in transforming health.

Now a clinical nutritionist in the U.S., the 36-year-old has helped some 3,000 clients, including celebrities, turn around their lifestyles.

And he reaches hundreds of thousands of people a month via his popular internet podcast, the Model Health Show.

As well as encouraging the right food, he offers his clients advice on any aspects of their lives that could affect their health. And a big part of that is sleep.

In his new book Sleep Smarter, he sets out to give practical strategies to help people improve the quality of their sleep.

By doing this, he maintains, you will see a knock-on effect on everything — weight, health, appearance, your performance at work and level of success.

On the other hand, if you’re sleep deprived, it can contribute to diabetes, cancer, obesity, depression, memory loss and heart disease.

And poor sleep quality is equal to binge drinking and marijuana use in determining academic performance, according to a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

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‘Unless you give your body the right amount of sleep, you will never have the body and life you want to have,’ says Shawn.

Yet we have become programmed to prioritise working harder oversleeping. Therefore Shawn says a good place to start is to make sleep a top priority, scheduling it into our diary as we would a big meeting.

It’s worked for him. Great-quality sleep every night helped turn Shawn from being 14 st 4 — with two herniated discs, an incurable bone disease and in constant pain — into a healthy and muscular 11 st 6 (he’s 5 ft 10).

It’s been an extraordinary transformation. After growing up in a deprived part of St Louis, Missouri, Shawn had had his sights set on getting into university with an athletics scholarship.

But aged 15, during running practice, his hip broke with no warning.

Dozens of smaller injuries followed and aged 20, he was diagnosed with degenerative bone disease and degenerative disc disease in his back.

This meant that his bones and spine were impossibly thin and could snap at the slightest impact.

His spine, he was told, had deteriorated to the point where it resembled an 80-year-old’s.

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