Adequate hours of sleep not only keep your body functioning properly but also has effects on your body weight. If you have been gaining weight recently, you might want to check your sleep schedule. While, your sleeping hours is not the only contributing factor towards your increasing weight, it certainly has its role to play in the process. If you think about it, you will realize that when you are feeling sleepy at work, you are most likely to grab more cups of coffee than the usual and may be also a doughnut for some quick energy. All of these will add up the calories and have direct effect on your body weight. Moreover, later, you might not hit the gym and rather pick up some food to skip cooking to sleep early. But when you are in bed, you are extremely wound up and cannot sleep.
This creates a vicious cycle where you do not get the adequate hours of sleep and in turn keep sabotaging your health along with your body weight. A number of fitness lifestyle blogs mention that the primary reason sleep deprivation leads to gaining body weight is whenever you feel sleepy because of losing sleep, you are sure to reach out for foods that have too much fat or carbs in them. They give you some quick energy and add up to your waistline. While getting the quick energy is a situational win, in the long run, this habit leads to terrible results of high body weight and an unfit body.
The connection between sleep and diet:
It is not that if you are sleeping properly then you will have a perfect modern lifestyle and health and have no chance of gaining weight. However, if you are losing sleep then your chances of gaining weight increases many folds as it messes up your metabolism rate. On an average, a person needs at least 7.5 hours of peaceful sleep every night. Now, if you are someone who is already following the hours, then adding more hours to sleep will not drastically help you to lose weight. But, if you are someone who is functioning on 5 hours of sleeping and are gaining weight, then sleeping for a goof 7.5 hours will help you to drop some weight.
The subsequent hormones that are at work here are leptin & ghrelin. Ghrelin tells one when you should eat and when you are losing sleep this hormone increases. Leptin tells one when you should stop eating but a sleep deprived person has less leptin. Therefore, the eating pattern gets messed up and thus results in weight gain.
The solution:
The solution to this problem is to understand your sleeping pattern properly. You need to check your hours of sleeping versus your hours of actually getting sleep. If you find it difficult to fall asleep at night, you should avoid taking caffeine in the afternoon as it would keep you in the lighter stages of sleep that would result into poor sleeping.
You can also do exercises and avoid afternoon naps to ensure that when you hit the bed at night, you fall asleep and get your required amount of sleep without trouble. You can also take help of any lifestyle blog to get a better understanding of the process.