Avoiding weight gain often requires that you get enough sleep to stay alert all day to keep your diet in check, especially during those late-night boxset sessions, but what if there was a way to put yourself and the likelihood of overindulging to bed at the same time? Well, get comfy, because the data reads like a dream.
A 2022 randomized clinical trial found that just one additional hour of sleep each night could help those who like to stay up late, and are overweight, to forego 270 fewer calories per day, without even realizing it. That equates to approximately 9 pounds over the course of a year, simply by sleeping more. So, put the streaming device down and consider pick up your pillow instead.
Why Sleeping Your Way Slim is Really a Thing
To get to these results, researchers looked at 80 overweight adults who slept for less than 6.5 hours per night. Since short sleep duration in itself is a risk factor for obesity, it stands to reason that getting more quality recovery time may help with weight loss, but when you consider that many of us do our most ‘damage’ in terms of eating the wrong foods late at night, the act of going to bed earlier shrinks the window of temptation, further bolstering our fat loss efforts. “Improving and maintaining healthy sleep duration over longer periods could be part of obesity prevention and weight loss programs,” concluded the study. This data also adds weight to an earlier 2018 report that found increasing ones sleep by around an hour per night meant less total food consumption and approximately 9.6g less sugar eaten per day.
The most exciting aspect of these results around dropping unwanted fat by improving our sleep hygiene is that those who lost the weight were not monitoring their calories. Going to bed earlier was all that they needed to do, in order to consume less food. It appears then, that along with eating healthily and tracking what we eat, getting adequate sleep (approx. 8 hours) is an important addition to our weight loss arsenal. Of course, sleep has a bevvy of other benefits too, such as improving our heart health and mental prowess. So, next time you are streaming your way into the early hours and wondering what’s in the fridge at an ungodly hour, do yourself a fat-saving favor and sleep your way slimmer instead.