Sleep more to stabilize your weight

Sleep deprivation will put a damper on your day. Just ask any new mom or weekend party type on a Monday morning. Your day drags. And according to a new study, your metabolism does to causing your body to slow down and use less energy.

The results of the study appear in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and add more evidence to the idea that sleep deprivation leads to weight gain, not just by making you hungry for no reason, but also slowing down the rate at which your body burns calories.

The study points to the idea that if you get enough sleep you won’t gain weight, according to Dr Christian Benedict of the Uppsala University in Sweden who led the research team. Disrupted sleep disrupts stress and hunger-related hormones.

To see exactly how it happens the tormented 14 male university students by changing the amount of sleep they were allowed to enjoy. After a night of delayed, slowed, limited or no sleep their activity was measured as well as physiological conditions relating to blood sugar, hormone levels and metabolic rate or oxygen use.

After a single night of screwed up sleep energy levels were down 5-20%. In the morning they also had higher levels of blood sugar, hormones like ghrelin and stress hormones like cortisol. Interestingly, sleep deprivation did not lead to an increased appetite for these subjects.

Still, not enough proof to say there’s a causal relationship between sleep deprivation and weight gain. But something is going on. A number of studies say that people who sleep less than five hours a night gain the weight as the sleep deprivation is occurring.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults get seven to nine hours of sleep a night. If you can’t commit to the sleep, to commit to a better diet and exercise regime.

Source: The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Reuters