Sleep and Weight Loss
If you are trying to lose weight, don’t skimp on your sleep. Not because you can “lose weight while you sleep” as many snake oil diet products may have you believe but because a lack of sleep can interfere with the concentrations of hormones that control appetite, causing you to eat more and disrupt your biological clock.
A recent study has shown that people who get less than four hours of sleep a night were 73 percent more likely to be obese than those who got the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep. Those who averaged 5 hours had a 50% greater risk, and at 6 hours a 23 percent greater risk.
Sleep deprivation lowers leptin, a blood protein that suppresses appetite and seems to affect the way that the brain senses when the body has had enough food. Sleep deprivation also raises the levels of grehlin (often referred to as the “hormone of hunger”) which is a hormone that makes people want to eat and control’s the body’s food intake.
The results of this study were presented this week at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.
