If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Want to lose weight? Get 8 hours of sleep.
A lack of good slumber riles up hormones
By Julie Beun-Chown, Canwest News ServiceSeptember 19, 2009
I t’s possibly the world’s most effortless and effective diet, simpler than author Michael Pollen’s pared-down manifesto to “Eat food. Not much. Mostly plants” and far easier to swallow than the Grapefruit Diet.
Ready?
Go to bed. Sleep for eight hours.
It sounds simple, so simple that six staff members at Glamour magazine gave it a go and, in the February edition, revealed they lost an average of four kilograms each without changing anything else–how much they exercised, or how much or what they ate.
And a compelling body of research increasingly shows that, scientifically speaking, sleep as a diet aid works.
In their 15-year study of 1,024 volunteers with sleep disorders, they found those getting less than four hours of sleep a night were 73 per cent more likely to be obese.
While our high-fat, high-sodium, high-everything diet certainly has much to do with our national pudginess, Dr. Helen Driver, an adjunct professor of medicine at Queen’s University and president of the Canadian Sleep Society, also puts the blame on sleep-killing technology.
“People people have computers and TVs in their bedrooms, they eat or read e-mail before they go to bed. The result is they don’t get a restful sleep. But I would say that if you’re sleep-deprived and you follow good sleep hygiene, you will lose weight without changing much else.”
How?A lack of sleep triggers a wave of reactions in the human body that starts with the hormones leptin, ghrelin and cortisol and ends with waking up exhausted and craving fat and carbohydrates, says Dr. Joseph De Koninck, director of the University of Ottawa’s Sleep Research Laboratory.
“There is no question that the hormones that control appetite are affected by the loss of sleep,” De Koninck says.
And it’s worse if you eat just before bed, he adds.
“People stay up late watching TV, they’re on the Internet and e-mail, they get hungry and eat something high-calorie. If you eat, your sleep is more fragmented because your body is digesting.”
The lack of deep, restorative rest also causes a drop in the satiety hormone leptin, which means that even after you do eat the next day, you won’t feel full.
Meanwhile, the hunger hormone ghrelin rises, setting the stage for overeating.
The third hormone cortisol is strongly related to the body’s daily, or circadian, rhythm, “and it’s involved with metabolic regulation,” explains Driver. “So stress and lack of sleep are intertwined, too.”
Researchers at the University of Chicago also studied the sleep patterns of 669 middle-aged volunteers in 2006, and found that while we may bed down an average 7.5 hours a night, women actually sleep for just 6.7 of them, while men get 6.1 hours.
“The average number of hours actually spent asleep has been reduced,” says Driver. “It should be up to eight hours.”
But by learning new habits –and getting any sleep disorders addressed– “You will lose weight,” says De Koninck.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Hearld
Please comment.
