Do you want to lose weight by sleeping? Extend your sleep time to avoid sleep deprivation.
That was the shocking result of a randomized trial in which young, overweight adults who generally slept less than six and a half hours per night were urged to try to sleep for roughly eight and a half hours per night for two weeks.
"Over the years, we and others have shown that sleep restriction has an effect on appetite regulation that leads to increased food intake, and thus puts you at risk for weight gain over time," lead investigator Esra Tasali from the University of Chicago Medicine said.
"More recently, the question that everyone was asking was, 'Well, if this is what happens with sleep loss, can we extend sleep and reverse some of these adverse outcomes?'"
According to research published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, many of those who did lengthen their sleep to a healthier length dropped their calorie consumption by an average of 270 calories per day at the conclusion of that brief period of time.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison were also involved in the study, which used a randomized clinical trial with 80 participants to answer this question. These people were overweight and slept for less than 6.5 hours each night on a regular basis, which is a known risk factor for obesity.
The goal was to see if extending their sleep duration may reduce this risk. The individuals took part in a four-week trial, the first two weeks of which were used to collect baseline data on sleep and calorie intake.
Subjects were then randomly assigned to sleep hygiene counseling, which increased their sleep duration by an average of 1.2 hours per night, while others were instructed to continue their previous sleeping patterns as a control group. Over the course of two weeks, all subjects slept on their own beds, tracked their sleep with wearable devices, and were generally expected to maintain their normal routines and diets.
The extra 1.2 hours of sleep resulted in a significant reduction in food consumption among the participants, with some eating as few as 500 calories per day. The intervention resulted in a calorie deficit among the participants, albeit for a brief amount of time, with an average reduction of 270 calories consumed.
However, one of the study's flaws is that none of the participants had insomnia or other significant sleep disorders, which affect millions of individuals.
Despite these constraints, he believes it is obvious that people trying to lose weight should pay attention to "to the amount of sleep that they are getting -- avoiding voluntary sleep deprivation is going to play an important role."
