Other than having exercise regularly and also to follow a strict diet, there is one more factor that can help people to lose their weight and this factor often got neglected by most people. The factor that mentioned was sleeping. Yes, sleeping also plays an important role that can help people worldwide to lose weight.
Based on researches that have been done, the recommended sleeping period for adults is seven to nine hours per night. Because of the busy schedule for some people, most of them have a lesser sleeping period than this. Researches also showed that sleeping less than the recommended amount of time could give the side effect of having greater body fat, influence on how easy to lose weight on a calorie-controlled diet, and also the risk of obesity got increased.
The major idea to lose weight is by achieving two things and that is, to decrease the amount of body fat and also to retain as much as possible the muscle mass. These two goals can easily be determined by the amount of sleep that every people got daily. Another study proves this hypothesis by showing that sleeping for 5.5 hours over a two week period resulted in lesser fat loss and greater loss of fat-free mass compared to having slept for 8.5 hours.
Several reasons why lesser sleeping time got linked with higher body weight would be because of the metabolism, appetite, and also food selection. Sleeping could influence two appetite hormones in the body and that are leptin and also ghrelin. The leptin hormone functions to decreases appetite while the ghrelin hormone functions to stimulate the appetite.
When we have a lesser amount of sleep, the study shows that levels of ghrelin hormone would increase while the levels of leptin hormone would decrease. This factor would lead a human beings to eat more than they normally do.
Next, sleep deprivation could affect food selection and also how the brain perceives food. Researchers have discovered that the areas of the brain responsible for reward are more active in response to food after a lesser sleep compared to people who had a good sufficient sleep.
Lastly, when humans being slept a lesser amount of time than what they should, it would affect the body’s metabolism especially glucose metabolism. This is because when the body got insufficient sleep, they would not be able to respond towards insulin, and hence the ability to uptake glucose got reduced.
Sources: Science Alert.