Are You Paying Attention to Sleep for Weight Loss?

Sleep for weight loss always sounds to me like some kind of scam pretending you can snooze away unwanted pounds. That’s not at all what I want to talk about here. Still, there is an important relationship between those two factors that I just don’t think gets enough attention.

Your Need to Sleep for Weight Loss

Last week, I talked about how many of us need to overhaul our attitudes toward sleep. I still think that’s true. That hasn’t changed in a week. That said, one part of that topic that I didn’t delve into very much is how important it is for regulating your body weight.

The need to sleep for weight loss is much larger than many of us realize.  Even those of us who know about it – me included – have a tendency to discount it when it’s inconvenient.  After all, as much as most of us love to get a good night of rest, we tend to put it off if we need to get more done at the end of a night (including watching a gripping show) or cut it off if we need to get a head start the next day.

The fact remains though, that we need sleep for weight loss, and if we’re not resting, we’re not losing like we could. If we are losing, it’s a lot harder to achieve than is necessary.

Research Points to This Relationship

For years, quality research has been underscoring the requirement of sleep for weight loss.  More recently, a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine added another layer to the understanding we already have.

In this study, the researchers set out to show that there is a link between how much an obesity patient sleeps and how much weight loss they achieve when they are restricting their food intake.  The participants in the study lived in a clinical research center for the length of the study. They ate and drank only what was provided to them so that their calories and food quantities could be accurately tracked. Careful records were kept of patient hormone levels (hormones associated with weight and appetite control), weight, and the amount of hunger reported. Exercise and sleep were also both tracked.

The researchers found that when participants slept only 5.5 hours per night, they didn’t lose as much body fat and overall body mass than the participants who slept 8.5 hours per night. They also found that when individual participants slept only 5.5 hours per night, they didn’t lose as much as they did when the had 8.5 hours per night. When sleep was shorter, participants reported higher levels of hunger.

Though I’ve openly shared that I found FENFAST 375 very helpful when I was losing weight, I feel that it might also have been beneficial for me to have considered a sleep supplement as well!