Sleep can help you lose weight. Do you want to know how? Time for a thread 👇
Diet and sleep are entwined. Improving one can help you improve the other and viceversa. Let’s focus on how sleep impacts your diet.
Scientists have found that as people lose sleep, they experience physiological changes that can nudge them to seek out junk food.
In clinical trials, healthy adults who are allowed to sleep only four or five hours a night end up consuming more calories and snacking more frequently throughout the day.
In men, sleep deprivation stimulates increased levels of ghrelin, the so-called hunger hormone, while in women, restricting sleep leads to lower levels of GLP-1, a hormone that signals satiety.
So in men, short sleep promotes greater appetite and desire to eat, and in women there is less of a signal that makes you stop eating.
Changes also occur in the brain. When men and women were restricted to four hours of nightly sleep for five nights in a row, they had greater activation in reward centers of the brain in response to pepperoni pizza, doughnuts and candy compared to healthy foods.
After five nights of normal sleep, however, this pattern of stronger brain responses to the junk food disappeared.
Another study demonstrated how proper sleep can increase your willpower to avoid unhealthy foods.
The study found that habitually short sleepers who went through a program to help them sleep longer — resulting in their getting roughly an hour of additional sleep each night — had improvements in their diet.
The most striking change was that they cut about 10 grams of added sugar from their diets each day, the equivalent of about two and a half teaspoons.
Bottom line: sleeping enough will help you avoid craving junk food and as a consequence your diet (and weight) will improve.
Here is the article: nytimes.com/2020/12/10/wel…
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