How Sleep Affects Your Weight

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructs adults between the ages of eighteen and sixty to sleep seven hours a night. Without sleeping this amount regularly, you may unknowingly increase your chances of obesity and other related life-threatening health conditions.

Here are four ways your sleep can affect your weight and what to do to fix it:

Lack of Sleep Increases Your Appetite for Higher Calorie Foods

When you aren’t sleeping enough, your body is tried, and it tries to find ways to give itself more energy. One way is to increase your hunger drive to get more nutrition in. But, of course, your body will crave the most highly caloric foods it can because it doesn’t know the difference on this level between a French fry and a green bean.

Sleep Deprivation Destroys Metabolism

Your body repairs and resets itself during a full night of sleep. It takes a minimum of 7 hours for your body to go through all the processes it does during your sleep. If you cut this short, you may avoid having your liver cleaned, or your brain reset for the new day. It’s no different than restarting your computer. You need it to ensure your metabolism and other functions of your body work properly.

Lack of Sleep Increases Fatigue Leading to a Sedentary Lifestyle

If you’re tired all the time, it’s hard to motivate yourself to go for that walk. Even if it is only 21 minutes of your time, it seems impossible. Moreover, the more sedentary you are, the more likely you are to be obese, and further, the more chances you will have to suffer from diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Sleep Deprivation Makes It Difficult to Control Cravings

When you’re not well-rested, your ability to say no is going to be cut down to almost nothing. Your body then starts getting hunger signals from your brain, but since it’s in survival mode, it seeks energy from the easiest source and will send out cravings for stuff like fatty, sugary coffee drinks to try to help. Unfortunately, this will only make it worse.

Even though you probably have more to do during the holidays than other times of the year, it’s even more important to try to maintain your standard sleep-wake schedule to avoid becoming overtired. Do you really need to do more if you don’t have time to live a healthy life that considers all your needs as a human? Your family would rather you be healthy and well-rested than for you to stay up all night stressing about making the holiday perfect since perfection isn’t even possible.