If your weight is slowly creeping up and your diet is impossible to control, your bad sleep habits could be to blame.
Research presented this weekend at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Lisbon, Portugal, demonstrates how chronic sleep loss messes up your body — including your appetite, metabolism, motivation and physical activity — in a way that leads to weight gain.
A team from Uppsala University, Sweden, reached this conclusion by recruiting groups of normal-weight people with healthy metabolisms then depriving them of sleep for a short period. The research revealed that sleep-deprived people, even those who’d slept poorly for just one night, appear to seek pleasure from food.
They choose larger portions, consume more calories, and are more impulsive in their choices (meaning you’re probably more likely to add discounted chocolate to your supermarket trolley after a restless night).
You eat more because of the toll bad sleep takes on your body’s chemistry: it shifts your hormones from ones that make you feel full to ones that spark your appetite, such as the hunger hormone ghrelin; and it increases your levels of endocannabinoids, chemicals that spark appetite (the ones that infamously give marijuana aficionados the munchies);
Bad sleep also slows down your metabolism, so you burn less calories; it reduces your sensitivity to the hormone insulin, a condition known to lead to weight gain; and it changes the balance of your gut bacteria, which likely screws up your metabolism even more.
Short version: bad sleep is bad for you.
“My studies suggest that sleep loss favours weight gain in humans,” said Dr Christian Benedict from Uppsala University in a statement. “Since perturbed sleep is such a common feature of modern life, these studies show it is no surprise that metabolic disorders, such as obesity are also on the rise.
It may also be concluded that improving sleep could be a promising lifestyle intervention to reduce the risk of future weight gain.”