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Weight management remains an ever so important topic not just in the medical circles but also in the social space. The buzz can be traced either to the health complications resulting from poor weight management or the social stigma attached to conditions like obesity. Ok, so what has sleep got to do with it? Let’s find out how adequate sleep is important for weight loss. Read on…
In the wake of massive publicity and enlightenment about how deadly diseases like diabetes and Cardiac arrest can result from being overweight, an obvious sign of excess fats and sugar stored up in the body, everyone seems to have been awakened to the importance of maintaining a balanced weight.
How does sleep play a role in weight loss?
From the social side to it, it seems everyone especially the female folk want to post a selfie of a perfect figure 8 online; so they all seem to be conscious of losing their shape to obesity. You know you’ll get knocks, knocks, and knocks for posting an overly shapeless busty selfie in some social community. It can leave you feeling so miserable. However, for so many people, all that is there to weight management is keeping fit and working out. Oh, how wrong!
This lopsided definition of weight management may have been responsible for why your devotion and efforts at keeping fit has yielded little or no result much to your dismay. It is so important that you understand that good weight management is a combination of complementary techniques for achieving not just a significant loss in weight but also maintaining a healthy body weight. Going by this definition weight management goes beyond physical fitness to include maintaining a healthy lifestyle and eating right. It’s a balance of these three elements that add up to maintaining a good weight. While many seem to be up and doing in keeping physically fit, they lag behind and leave dieting and healthy living to suffer.
Your sleeping habit is one lifestyle issue you probably do not know compliments physical fitness in helping you achieve tremendous weight loss. If you sleep well, I mean maintaining the lifestyle sleeping for the daily medically recommended time of at least, 8 hours, your chances of losing weight are higher. If you lack good sleep, you’re most likely going to keep adding weight.
Why does it happen this way?
In human, weight loss or gain is a function of hormonal activities triggered by sleeping habit. Specifically, the hormones involved here are leptin, ghrelin, and insulin. Your body’s level of leptin and ghrelin production determines how often you feel hunger pangs. When the level of leptin, a hormone produced in your fat cell is low, you feel hungrier. Conversely, the higher the level of ghrelin your body produces, the more hunger bites hard. Low level of leptin and high ghrelin secretion are hormonal conditions caused by sleep deprivation. And guess what!
Don’t think you have the willpower to restrain yourself from eating at this time? That’s because another hormone responsible for fat gain, Cortisol, is also released when your body is stressed from lack of sleep. In addition, Cortisol triggers your brain’s pleasure center so that you want food in excess. As if this is not enough blow to your dieting discipline, yet another part of your brain, the frontal lobe that controls decision making, goes dysfunctional when you are sleep deprived. It would have been your last line of defence and resistance against the overwhelming appetite that consumes you with increased hormonal activity.
But alas, it also goes south! It just appears you have been plunged into a stupor of indulging your appetite. Now in this state, tell me how you’ll have the right mind to stick with all those hard and fast rule of exercising more and eating less you have been taught at the fitness center. And I am not just done yet, there is still one more hormone that’s affected when you lack enough sleep. Meanwhile, it is pertinent to add that more ghrelin secretion also leads to a reduction in calorie-burn-rate and increase in fat storage.
To worsen the case insulin, another hormone that helps fat cells absorb fatty acids and lipids is affected with lack of sleep; this results in excess fat content in your bloodstream and layers of fat building up in the tissues of delicate organs like the liver; when this goes on for some time it affects the functioning of the liver and degenerates into terminal health conditions.
So, here is the summary of the whole pale picture. Lack of sleep sets your system ablaze with a hunger for larger chunks, more junk, and brings your resistance and ability for restraining to zero level; you’re just helpless, you give in.
What you must begin to do right
You must just begin to catch enough sleep; where you had to unavoidably cut short your sleeping hours to meet the tight office deadlines or cope with busy work schedule, do well to make-out time to make it all up. It’s better to answer nature’s call to sleep comfortably on your cozy bed and reap the health benefits than waiting to pay the piled up debt of sleep deprivation on a sick bed looking the exact opposite for what you wish for your shape.
Got sleep issues? Make an appointment to see your GP/Family doctor.
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by Hridya
A biochemist by education who could never put what she studied to good use, finally found GetDoc as a medium to do what she loved - bring information to people using a forum that is dedicated to all things medical. View all articles by Hridya.
