In other words: The quality of your sleep has a direct impact on your ability to lose weight. Getting a good night sleep helps you lose fat! ( I admit had to look up ‘adiposity’ … big word for FAT )
In Insufficient Sleep Thwarts Weight Loss Efforts Medscape Medical News reports on new research published in the October 5 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“Many people today are overweight or obese, and diet-induced weight loss is a widely used strategy to reduce the health risks associated with excess adiposity,” write Arlet V.Nedeltcheva, MD, from the University of Chicago, Illinois, and colleagues. “The neuroendocrine changes associated with sleep curtailment in the presence of caloric restriction, however, suggest that lack of sufficient sleep may compromise the efficacy of commonly used dietary interventions in such persons.”
In this study, the authors examined whether “recurrent bedtime restriction” affected the amount of weight people lost when dieting, increased their hunger, and affected their leptin and ghrelin serum concentrations. They also examined changes in circulating cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, thyroid, and growth hormone concentrations due to sleep loss.
They randomized 10 overweight, nonsmoking adults (3 women, 7 men) whose mean age was 41 years and whose body mass index ranged from 25 to 32 kg/m2 to 14 days of dieting and 8.5 hours of nighttime sleep and then to a similar period of dieting and 5.5 hours of nighttime sleep.
The study took place in a sleep laboratory, and subjects were sedentary and spent their waking hours doing home office–type work or leisure activities.
The study found that the reduced sleep decreased the proportion of weight lost as fat by 55%. Subjects who slept 8.5 hours per night lost a mean of 1.4 kg, and those who slept 5.5 hours per night lost a mean of 0.6 kg (P= .043).
Also, sleep curtailment increased the loss of fat-free body mass by 60%. Subjects who slept 8.5 hours per night lost a mean of 1.5 kg, whereas those who slept 5.5 hours lost a mean of 2.4 kg (P = .002).