Sleep yourself skinny

The skinny on beauty sleep

And behind this ‘sleep yourself skinny’ idea there is a bunch of evidence to support it. This evidence gives it strong enough support to rank it effective for weight loss.

Still not convinced? Well let me explain exactly how sleep can actually help you to lose weight.

It all has to do with hormones

And believe it or not, our sleep plays a big role in effecting our hormones. And the hormones which are affected the most are leptin and ghrelin. And as we all know these hormones walk hand in hand with our weight loss.

Just to get a better idea of what these hormones do, let us pretend we are driving a car which is called hunger. The break on this car is called leptin while the accelerator is called ghrelin.

We can only push one of these pedals at a time and it will help tell our body if we are hungry or not.  So if we have high amounts of leptin in our body we feel fuller and less hungry. If ghrelin is high we will feel hungrier and less full. And obviously when we feel hungrier we end up eating more.

Lack of sleep is linked to inflammation

It has been shown that a shorter sleep increases inflammation in the body which also been linked to increased weight gain.

The results that were found in two meta-analysis research studies really showed the effect that sleep has on weight. They showed that every one hour of sleep lost is associated with an increase in BMI of 0,35kg/m². This might sound only like a little bit but it is actually a lot.

For a person with a height of 1,7 metres who continuously lost an hour of good sleep a night, the increase in BMI will equal one kilogram of weight. If that same person continuously lost three hours of sleep a night then they would be carrying an extra three kilograms.

It is estimated that there is an increase of 60 to 80 percent in adults and children being obese if they have shorter sleep duration.

Why aren't we getting enough sleep?

In some cases, being unable to sleep is an indication of another condition, such as depression or anxiety, that requires medical attention. However, for the most of us, a lack of sleep is linked to our hectic lifestyles. When there’s so much to do, the one thing that we think that we can afford to cut down on is sleep. In reality, cutting down on sleep hurts our health and adds inches to our waistlines.

It’s time to follow the doctors’ orders and ‘get eight hours of sleep a night'.

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