Battling Fat? Get More Sleep

The latest findings of researchers indicate that sleep can actually help you lose weight. On the other hand, lack of sleep can cloud your mind, affect cognition, contribute to weight gain and raise your risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

An article from http://health.usnews.com has featured several insights on how sleep can actually help you lose fat.

• Sleep deprivation tends to lead to overeating. This is because as researchers have observed, lack of sleep makes people vulnerable to the calls of fast food, pizza and candy.

• Short sleep affects hormones that influence hunger and satiety, experts say, and the brain's reward center becomes more active, making you crave carbs and fat.

• A pattern of insufficient sleep raises your risk for obesity, and diabetes, too. Restricting sleep and disrupting the body clock lowered metabolism and spiked blood glucose levels after eating breakfast, a sign that the insulin-producing pancreas isn't fully doing its job.

• Disrupted circadian rhythms can give rise to decreased blood insulin levels

• Just one week of less than six hours of sleep per night disrupted the activity of some 700 genes, including ones associated with metabolism and the body's immune and stress responses.

• Artificial light from screens may suppress melatonin, which plays a role in the sleep cycle.

• Higher quality sleep improved glucose levels and insulin sensitivity possibly as much as some oral diabetes medications.

• People who regularly get less than the optimum amount of sleep have been observed to eat 200 to 500 more calories per day than people who do not.

• Blue colour is the most circadian-disrupting colour.

• When you drop below 6 ½ or six hours of sleep, you need sleep more than you need to exercise.

Read more here:

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2013/10/08/battling-fat-get-more-sleep

Image  Courtesy of Jeanne Claire Maaarbes / freedigitalphotos.net