Can you really dream yourself slim?

For those of us conscious of our body weight, struggling to fight the fat, we often find ourselves eating leaves and counting calories. However, for the sleep deprived amongst us, the ideal slimming remedy may only be a good night’s sleep away.

A bad night’s sleep means you are more likely to be reaching for the coffee. A desperate need for energy will attract you to the comfort foods loaded with sugar and carbs. Of course, being too tired also means that the sliver of motivation you had to go to the gym is destroyed, and you’re far more likely to pick up a ready-meal on your way home instead of cooking something healthy. You finally get into bed for an early night but you find that you have consumed too much caffeine, carbs and sugar to get to sleep… and the vicious cycle starts again!

Before you know it, it will have affected your waist line, as well as your health. Researchers have found that sleep deprivation doesn’t only affect our behaviour but also influences our body at a molecular level.

Medical evidence can now provide fascinating links between sleep and weight. Studies have shown that the quality and duration of sleep greatly affects the levels of certain hormones in the blood. Some key hormones found to alter with sleep are ghrelin, the hunger-stimulating hormone and leptin, the hormone that tells you to stop eating. These two hormones discipline our appetite.

Sleep deprivation will increase the levels of ghrelin and decrease the levels of leptin ultimately leading to weight gain over time, as not only are you eating more, but your metabolism is slower in a sleep deprived state.

As well as these hormones, fat cells displayed a decreased ability to respond to insulin in a sleep deprived state. One study investigated the effects of sleep on fat cells’ responsiveness to insulin and involved six men and one woman who had four consecutive nights of eight hours sleep, followed by four nights of 4.5 hours. Researchers found that insulin responses decreased by 16 perecent when the participants were deprived of sleep. Insulin is the hormone that causes cells to take up glucose from the blood, therefore if cells do not respond to insulin, levels of glucose remain high in the blood and over time this can cause complications leading to obesity and even Type-2 diabetes.

To improve your sleeping pattern, avoid caffeine after 2pm, as its effects in the body will prevail many hours after consumption. Other advice includes trying not to have heavy meals before bed, as this will increase the chances of heart burn and keep you up all night. Those of you who have cereal before bed are on the right track. Finally, try to include some exercise in your day, as this will exhaust the body and help you drift off quickly into a deeper sleep.

Overall these findings don’t suggest that if we sleep we lose weight, but if you are sleep -deprived or not getting good quality of rest then your metabolism is negatively influenced. If you are getting eight hours sleep, an extra half hour will not lead to weight loss, but someone who is currently on five hours sleep and starts to sleep seven hours can drop weight. Ideally we need 7.5 hours of good quality sleep per night to maintain a healthy physiological state.

Although sleep may help us maintain a good physique, a combination of healthy living, such as eating sensible foods and carrying out regular exercise remain fundamental elements for a healthy body.