Can Sleep Affect Your Ability To Lose Weight?
The science behind sleep and weight loss
There is no question—sleep plays a crucial role in weight loss. In fact, it’s one of the most important factors to consider when you’re trying to lose weight, along with diet and exercise. Poor quality sleep, or not getting enough sleep, leads to increased hunger, cravings for unhealthy foods, fat storage, and changes to your hormones and metabolism that can make losing weight difficult.
In this article, we will break down the science behind sleep, why it’s important, and how it can affect your ability to lose or maintain weight.
Why do we sleep?
Humans need sleep to allow their body and brains to recover and continue to fully function the next day. Sleep not only restores your body physically, it helps the body to regulate and reset everything from emotional to hormones and metabolism. Essentially, sleep is the whole-body maintenance process that keeps your overall health and energy balanced and in check.
What happens when we sleep?
When you sleep, your body runs through several processes to restore and re-energize your body and mind. Sleep is divided into several stages, they include: Non-REM:
During non-REM sleep, your body physically repairs itself, strengthens your immune system, and refills your energy stores like a battery recharging. There are three stage in non-REM sleep.
Light sleep
Moderate sleep
Deep sleep
REM (Rapid Eye Movement):
During REM sleep, your brain processes emotions and dreams, as well as other processes that keep your mood regulated and new memories stored. Rem typically occurs 90 minutes after falling asleep and last longer during each sleep cycle. Adults typically have 4-6 cycles a night.
How does sleep affect weight loss?
Now that you have a better understanding of what sleep is and its role in our health, how does it affect weight loss? The importance of sleep when you’re looking to lose weight cannot be overemphasized.
Balances hormones and metabolism
Several studies have clearly shown that sleep is essential to weight loss because of its effects on your metabolism and hormones. In a nutshell, sleep allows your body to reset, heal, and de-stress. When you aren’t sleeping enough (at least 7 solid hours a night), your body doesn’t have a chance to properly reset hormone levels.
This sends your body into a bit of a frenzy, ramping up your hunger hormones (like ghrelin, which makes you hungry), and cranking down the ones that make you feel full (leptin). Chronic sleep deprivation (sleeping less than 6 hours a night) has been associated with a higher body mass index (BMI). Because of these hormone changes, sleep deprived people tend to eat and drink more and often make unhealthy food choices.
High cortisol
Sleep deprivation also leads to the release of cortisol (your stress hormone response), which makes you more hungry, your body then stores more fat, and becomes more resistant to insulin.
Essentially, getting poor quality sleep slows down your metabolism and increases fat storage. A slower metabolism then makes it harder to burn off extra calories despite exercising more and changing your diet.
On the other hand, when you sleep well, you have a better chance of losing weight and keeping it off. Weight loss is increased by 33% for people who get 7 or more hours of uninterrupted sleep at night on a regular basis. This is because proper sleep supports hormonal balance, helping to control appetite and maintain healthy metabolic function, both key for weight loss.
Common reasons for sleep deprivation:
There are many things that can cause someone to not get enough sleep, leading to sleep deprivation. Some of these reasons can include:
Stress
Anxiety
Caffeine consumption
Alcohol consumption
Night shift work
Using electronic devices at bed time
Pain or illness
Noise or light interruptions
Sleep disorders like insomnia
Sleep apnea
Irregular sleep schedules
Poor sleep is also associated with regaining weight after weight loss. So even after you’ve reached your goal weight, getting those 7+ hours is key to long-term weight loss.
How to improve sleep for weight loss
So, how do you actually improve your sleep with weight loss in mind? Here are some practical tips you can try today, and check out our full article on tips for getting better sleep.
Establishing a regular sleep schedule and sticking to it as much as possible helps your body’s internal clock know when it’s time to sleep and wake up.
Avoiding screen time around bed time is also very helpful as the light emitted from your phone or tablet can keep you awake. Try to keep your room dark, cool, and quiet.
Try to avoid caffeine after noon, and don’t exercise vigorously too close to bedtime.
Stress during the day can also mess with your sleep. Try incorporating breathing exercises, yoga, or other relaxation strategies to reduce stress and help you wind down from a hard day.
Prioritizing sleep for weight loss results
As shown in this clinical study, increasing the quantity and quality of sleep leads to reduced hunger and less calories eaten, which leads to weight loss. Knowing this, it is a no-brainer that prioritizing your sleep is one of the most important things you can do when striving toward health and weight loss goals.
If after trying the strategies above you still find yourself having a hard time sleeping, speak to your doctor to make sure there aren’t any health issues that could be causing you to have poor quality sleep. They may want to do a sleep study to determine if there is an underlying issue.
Start seeing weight loss results today
At Agile, we incorporate lifestyle adjustments into all of our medical weight loss programs. Our licensed clinicians offer lifestyle recommendations, medication guidance and more to promote long-term weight loss success and maintenance.
This includes identifying stress reduction, optimizing sleep, offering diet recommendations and working alongside a board-certified provider to track your progress. Interested in learning more?
See if you qualify for our weight loss program and schedule an initial, no-cost consultation with one of our providers.
