Snooze to Lose: the importance of sleep

The following is basically lifted right from the pages of the book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson - a fabulous book compiling all kinds of recent data and studies regarding children...this is from Chapter 2: The Lost Hour - about how even 1 extra hour of sleep makes an enormous difference: (italics mine)


"...Sleep loss increases the hunger hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases it's metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses appetite. Sleep loss also elevates the stress hormone cortisol which is lipogenic - meaning it stimulates your body to make fat. Human growth hormone is also disprupted. Normally secreted as a big pulse at the begining of sleep, growth hormone is essential to break down fat.

"It's drilled into us that we need to be more active to lose weight. So it spins the mind to hear that a key to staying thin is to spend more time doing the most sedentary inactivity humanly possible. Yet this is exactly what some scientists seem to be finding..."

And on the Ketomist support site, time and again people talk about discovering that if they weigh early in the morning and then go back to bed, they'll wake up later to a bigger loss.  Often a full pound more than when they first weighed. And that if they stay up late and don't get enough sleep, they'll wake up to no loss, or a tiny loss, or even a gain. Is it the bursts of human growth hormone?  Is it leptin or ghrelin at work? Is it all three combined? (I think it's all three factors plus things medical science still hasn't even figured out yet, probably.)

But the point is - are you listening? You snooze - you lose!!!

;)