Inadequate Sleep Can Make You Fat
 

In the morning, do you always snooze your alarm clock a few times before waking?
Or do you feel sleepy in the middle of your work, and needed a cup coffee so badly?
Or do you skipped your evening exercise because you are too tired?
Or do pick up "to go" meal because you are too tired to cook?

All these problems have a common denominator: SLEEP DEPRIVATION.

Inadequate sleep is a vicious cycle that can cause weight gain and affect your health.

It started off when you have inadequate sleep, and your body is running low on energy. So your brain tells you to grab any food that is high in energy. Because high energy food means high calories food, you automatically grab yourself a bag of chips (or any other high calories snacks). Now you feel less tired, but you unintentionally increase your weight. When we are deprived of sleep, our body make wrong food choice easily, and it also give us our excuse to skip our exercise routine. Both cause our weight gain.

Is Sleep Diet Real?

Sleep Diet encourages dieter to sleep more so as to slim down. If you have read or heard about sleep diet, you must be wondering if it is really true. Well, it's partially true.

If you do not sleep enough, your metabolism will reduce. Our body need about 7.5 hours of sleep a day for your metabolism to be at it optimum. So if you are not sleeping enough, try sleeping more, and you will see your weight dropping. However, if you are already sleeping 7.5 hours per day, sleeping extra does not help you drop further.

The Science Behind Sleeping and our Diet

Apart from the bad food choice and lack of exercise that we mentioned earlier, inadequate sleep can also affect our hormones. Leptin and ghrelin are two hormones which control your feeling of hunger and fullness.

Ghrelin: hormone produced in gastrointestinal tract that can stimulate appetite.

Leptin: hormone produce by fat cell which can trigger the feeling of fullness in a person.

Research has shown that inadequate sleep (7.5 hours or less) can reduce the production of leptin, and increase the production of ghrelin. This can cause a person's appetite to increase, and at the same time, he/she will not feel satisfied after eating. This result in overeating, thus causing weight gain.

How to improve Sleep?
- Avoid caffeine drinks after 2pm
- Exercise can improve sleep quality
- Avoid heavy meals 4 hours before you sleep
- Make your sleep time and wake time same everyday



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