Lack of Sleep and Overeating
One of the things that causes us to overeat, even when we have the best plan out there and tend to stick to a healthy diet most of the time, is a lack of sleep. This may be hard to believe since the two don’t seem immediately related to one another, however, there are some solid studies on the fact that sleep deprivation and overconsumption of food are definitely related. I guess that it sort of makes sense since your body probably thinks it needs more “fuel” since it didn’t get enough sleep, and it seeks out that “fuel” from the food you eat, thereby making you eat too much and then put on weight.
If you’re watching your weight or you are trying to diet, sleep can be one of the critical components of a successful diet campaign since if you are an individual who habitually does not get enough sleep, you may be already having a leg down in the fight to lose excess pounds, which are, in essence, excess calories that are stored in not so glamorous places on your body. Even if you work really early in the morning, you have to make sure that you are getting at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night. Not only will your body benefit in weight but you will also conceivable extend your life expectancy since sleep is one of the factors that determines your mortality rate and age.
The physiological reason for lack of sleep’s contribution to increasing your waistline through increasing your appetite is that when you do not get enough sleep, two of the key hormones in your body that control the ever important appetite, leptin and ghrelin, are diminished quite significantly when you don’t get enough shut eye. These two hormones, when diminished, do not have the power over the body to suppress your appetite when you are satiated. Because they actually determine your satiety, you essentially don’t have the all important off switch that tells you to stop eating, or your off switch is greatly delayed, resulting in you cramming more pound increasing calories in your body.
In a study, it was shown that people who were sleep deprived for a night had an immediate decline in their leptin and ghrelin levels, to the tune of almost 20%, which helped to determine how much they were going to eat that day. They almost always would keep eating beyond what they normally would, because their bodies didn’t have that inhibition and off switch that they normally do. This is why they say one of the contributing factors to obesity is lack of sleep.
