How can I explain to people that not getting enough sleep will also make you fat?

Losing weight is difficult, it is difficult, as difficult as climbing to the sky. There are many stumbling blocks on every road to weight loss, such as not liking to exercise and having no resistance to delicious food. Therefore, even if you are determined to lose weight every day, you will get fatter and fatter.

However, some people are not overeating, but why are they still fat? The reason is a bit heartbreaking, it may be due to sleep. Studies have shown that lack of sleep can also lead to obesity. Let's take a look at today's article.

01 It is true that not getting enough sleep will make you fat

The relationship between sleep and weight gain was discovered 50 years ago, but it did not attract enough attention until recent years, when many researchers began to specifically study the relationship between sleep and obesity.

Public health researcher Zhang Jinwen surveyed the living habits of more than one million Chinese people and found that people who sleep less than six hours a night have a higher rate of obesity.

Clinical psychologist Randall Jorgensen published a study in the journal Sleep:

As sleep time decreases, waist circumference will gradually increase.

Adult short sleepers have a 1.55 times higher risk of obesity and weight gain than the average person, and children and adolescents are more likely to become obese due to shortened sleep.

There is growing evidence that lack of sleep can lead to weight gain. Why is this?

Image source: pexels

02 Always feeling hungry may be because you don’t get enough sleep

There are two factors in our body that control our appetite:

One is the appetite-stimulating hormone (Ghrelin) and the other is Leptin.

"Orexin" is a hormone secreted by the human stomach that acts on the brain to make us feel hungry.

The secretion of appetite-stimulating hormones increases as sleep time decreases, thereby increasing the probability of obesity caused by overeating.

Many netizens have also discovered the subtle relationship between sleep and weight, and they shared:

Another factor is "leptin", which is produced by fat cells and can bring a sense of fullness, keeping our appetite under control.

Poor sleep can also affect the level of leptin in our body.

Once you don’t sleep well, the leptin level in the human body will decrease and your appetite will increase greatly, which is really heartbreaking.

03 When you don’t get enough sleep, you always like to eat high-calorie foods

Are there always some people in your circle of friends who like to gossip late at night, ordering crayfish, fried chicken, barbecue...

Which of these foods is not high in calories and fat?

I've never seen anyone order vegetable salad as a midnight snack~

Alyssa Lundahl has conducted research:

Poor sleep will reduce the energy in our body. At this time, the compensation mechanism will come into play, our self-control will be reduced, and we will want to consume more high-energy foods.

These high-calorie foods are converted into fat and stored in the body. When the fat accumulates to a certain amount, it leads to obesity.

Also shared by Weibo users:

Oops... Lack of sleep not only makes your taste heavier, but the disrupted biological clock also slows down the body's metabolism, leading to a lower calorie consumption rate. Calorie consumption and intake cannot maintain a balance, and excess calories will be converted into fat and stored in the body.

04Change 1/3 of your life and influence the remaining 2/3

Let’s look at the key points:

The reasons why lack of sleep makes us fat are:

Get hungry faster, eat more, choose high-calorie foods, and slow down metabolism

I’m so angry. It turns out that we can’t help eating because we don’t know how to sleep.

I am increasingly discovering how important a good sleep is to life.

Not only obesity, but also high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, dementia... are all closely related to sleep.

If you are not satisfied with your current work, life and physical condition, try to improve your sleep time by 1/3 of your life, because this is simply killing two birds with one stone.

To quote Professor William Dement of the Stanford University Sleep Research Institute:

Sleep is a great gift for life beyond just sleeping.