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Are your bad sleeping habits making you fat?

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Credit: iStock
Credit: iStock

Sleep more, weigh less

Lack of sleep makes you fat

Is your sleep schedule behind your weight gain?

I have been seeing these types of headlines for years now, but I admit, I have been ignoring them. It just seemed unfeasible to me that late nights could cause weight gain.

I have unpacked it today, and I think my out-of-hand dismissal of this potential truth stems from three things I know to be true:

a) Sleep is passive, so surely sleeping more, not less would make you fat?

b) Losing weight is difficult, so just adding a couple of hours to your nightly rest sounds like a snake oil remedy.

c) I sleep plenty and no one would describe me as being particularly scrawny.

Read more: To sleep or not to sleep

But since examining reasons for weight gain and loss sometimes kind of falls into that category that I call “my job” I thought I would get over my prejudice and explore these claims further.

And wouldn’t you know, everything I’ve read so far seems to point to my being wrong…

*Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or a qualified science journalist. I am merely relaying to you what I have researched on medically and scientifically sound websites such as Science Daily, WebMD, The Mayo Clinic and the Sleep Foundation. 

So without further ado, here’s a list of reasons why bad sleeping patterns may lie at the root of your weight gain: 

1) According to this study on Nutrition.org, bad sleeping habits influence the metabolism negatively since it messes with your hunger controlling hormones: ghrelin and leptin. These endocrine hormones regulate hunger and appetite: ghrelin tells your body to eat and leptin tells it to stop. The sleep deprived have more ghrelin and less leptin, thus you will feel more hunger and less satiation after too little sleep. 

2) In another article on WebMD they report that cortisol spikes when you don’t get enough sleep. This results in telling your body to conserve energy in waking hours, which will make you more likely to hang on to fat instead of burning it. 

3) This article in Science Daily suggests that sleep deprivation may have an impact on a person’s basal metabolic rate. That means, the less you sleep the fewer calories you’ll burn by just being alive.

4) The National Sleep Foundation says that people confuse fatigue with hunger, which is often why people eat more when they are tired. You will also be more prone to reach for a high-sugar and high-fat food or drink when you are feeling low in energy. 

5) When you’re feeling tired you’re also less likely to do exercise. This is just human nature. Even though exercise will make you feel better and generally more energised (I swear, it's true), it’s hard to drag yourself to the gym when you feel like a sack of potatoes and you can barely keep your eyes open. 

6) Instead, you’ll want to eat more carbs! According to this article on The Huffington Post, you’re actually just looking for something to make you feel better. And that something is carbs! And sure, carbs might give you a temporary lift, but in the long run it causes havoc with your insulin levels, energy, and appetite.

Read more: Is taping your mouth shut the key to undisturbed sleep?

7) According to the Oxford Academic, getting less sleep than you need also makes your body produce more endocannabinoid – a lipid that works on the reward centre of your brain and actually makes you enjoy eating more. And if you enjoy the food you're eating more, you'll probably be eating more of it...

So while none of these studies say that adding an extra couple of hours to your nightly rest will result in dramatic weight loss, it does seem that the cumulative effect of all these different factors may very well result in totally unnecessary weight gain. 

Either way, I definitely don’t need a further excuse to indulge my love of sleep. 

What do you think? Have you noticed how a change in your sleeping patterns affects your appetite or your weight? Tell us about it. 

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