Sleeping May Help Keep You Slim
A good night’s sleep may not just leave you feeling refreshed - it may also help to keep you trim. Researchers from Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, followed nearly 70,000 women for 16 years. They found women who slept five or fewer hours a night were a third more likely to put on at least 33lbs (15kg) than sound sleepers during that time. Details were presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference in San Diego. The study is by far the largest to track the effects of sleep habits on weight gain over a long period of time. It also found that lighter sleepers were 15% more likely to become obese compared with women who slept for seven hours a night. Obesity is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or more. BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in metres
Eating not key.
The researchers found that their findings had nothing to do with light sleepers eating too much, or taking too little exercise. On average, women who slept five hours or less per night weighed 5.4 pounds more at the beginning of the study than those sleeping seven hours, and gained an additional 1.6 pounds more over the next 10 years. Lead researcher Dr Sanjay Patel said: “That may not sound like much, but it is an average amount - some women gained much more than that, and even a small difference in weight can increase a person’s risk of health problems such as diabetes and hypertension (blood pressure).” “Prior studies have shown that after just a few days of sleep restriction, the hormones that control appetite cause people to become hungrier, so we thought that women who slept less might eat more. But in fact they ate less. That suggests that appetite and diet are not accounting for the weight gain in women who sleep less.”
