Have you found a way to lose 20 pounds easily without dieting or exercising?

As an essential physiological activity of the human body, sleep occupies nearly 1/3 of a person's life. The quality of sleep affects the body's functions and health, and even directly determines a person's quality of life.

When the body is in a sleeping state, the brain and body can rest, regulate and recover. Sufficient sleep can ensure that the human body is energetic, improve memory and concentration, and achieve efficient learning and work.

Not only that, according to a recent study, getting more sleep can also help the body "lose weight"!

On February 7, JAMA Internal Medicine published the results of a clinical trial conducted by the University of Chicago Medicine Sleep Center, which showed that extending sleep time can significantly reduce the body's energy intake.

Image source: hippopx

In this study, the researchers selected overweight people who habitually slept less than 6.5 hours per night as the research subjects. They divided the subjects into an experimental group and a control group, and extended the sleep time of the individuals in the experimental group by 1.2 hours. Other conditions remained the same as those of the control group.

The results showed that compared with the control group, the experimental group that extended their sleep time was able to reduce their total calorie intake by 270 kcal per day. According to this trend, a person can lose 12 kilograms in three years just by sleeping more. (Theoretically)

It seems that as long as you increase your sleep time, losing weight is not a dream...

01

Can sleeping more really help you lose weight?

Can getting more sleep really help you lose weight? The answer is: It really can!

Science believes that the imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure is the main reason for weight change. In layman's terms, the principle of weight loss is "more out, less in".

Energy intake can be regulated by body homeostasis (e.g., appetite and hunger), while energy expenditure can be consciously regulated through physical activity, such as exercise, or unconsciously regulated through basal metabolism and body heat production. Influencing body weight by affecting the relative amounts of energy intake and energy expenditure may be one mechanism by which sleep affects body weight.

1. Sleep affects the secretion of hormones in the human body, which in turn affects energy intake

The control of appetite is coordinated through the complex actions of multiple neuroendocrine hormones. The hormones associated with sleep-weight loss include leptin and ghrelin.

Leptin is a protein hormone that participates in the regulation of the body's metabolism, increases satiety, and inhibits the body's desire to eat; ghrelin is a protein that binds to corresponding receptors. After a part of ghrelin binds to the ghrelin receptors in the hypothalamus, it will make the body feel intense hunger and promote appetite.

Experiments have shown that lack of sleep increases the secretion of ghrelin, reduces the level of leptin in the body, increases hunger and appetite, and thus leads to an increase in energy intake.

In fact, Marie Pierre St-Ong, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University, who explored the relationship between sleep and appetite in a 2011 study, found that people who slept only four hours a night ate more the next day, by about 300kcal.

2. Sleep quality affects human energy consumption

Studies have shown that when people do not get enough sleep, the fatigue they feel will reduce their motivation to participate in physical activities. According to statistics, people who do not get enough sleep will have less physical activity, eat less healthily, and spend most of their time watching TV and using mobile phones, which are all factors that cause obesity.

In addition, the human body's unconscious energy consumption is to support metabolic processes, maintain body temperature, and deal with problems such as excessive energy intake. When sleep time is insufficient, unconscious energy consumption will also be greatly reduced.

When both conscious and unconscious energy consumption of the human body decreases, the energy taken into the body cannot be effectively consumed, resulting in energy retention and fat growth.

To sum up, since lack of sleep will lead to increased energy intake and reduced energy expenditure, which in turn causes obesity, then allowing people who are originally sleep-deprived to get enough sleep can actually help them lose weight.

02

Conversely, does losing weight affect sleep?

At the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions in November 2012, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine presented a new finding: Weight loss can improve sleep quality.

Losing weight, especially abdominal fat, can help the body reduce inflammation and insulin resistance, while also reducing breathing stress on the lungs, thereby improving sleep quality.

Good sleep will promote the body's metabolism level, making people naturally thinner. It can also prevent weight rebound and enter a virtuous cycle of "weight loss-improved sleep quality".

Therefore, it may not be important whether being overweight affects sleep first or sleep affects weight first, because they are an organic cycle that influences and interacts with each other.

"The best conclusion to draw from our findings is that if you are both overweight and have poor sleep, improving one will likely improve the other," the researchers said.

03

The longer you sleep, the better.

Too much sleep may also lead to obesity, because if you sleep too much, your exercise will inevitably decrease, and the excess energy in the body cannot be consumed and can easily be converted into fat and accumulated in the body.

In 2021, Lin Ren, Xu Lijuan and others published a paper specifically studying the relationship between childhood and adolescent obesity and lack of sleep. The results showed that sleep time and childhood and adolescent obesity had a U-shaped relationship. The optimal sleep time was between 7-8 hours. The obesity rate of children and adolescents who slept too long or too short was significantly higher than that of children with the optimal sleep time.

Image source: hippopx

Therefore, too much sleep will not only fail to lose weight, but will lead to weight gain.

Therefore, everything should be done in moderation. To solve the century-old problem of losing weight, we should take health as the premise and solve it slowly!

References:

[1] Lin Ren, Xu Lijuan, Tang Shiqi. Research progress on the relationship between obesity and insufficient sleep in children and adolescents[J]. Chinese Journal of Health Management, 2021, 15(03): 305-307.

END

Review expert: Wu Xi, associate chief physician of the Department of Endocrinology, Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University, Doctor of Medicine.

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