Can Sleeping More Help You Lose Weight?

It sounds almost too good to be true but according to two different studies, getting more sleep has a direct connection to controlling the hormones in your body that send you hunger impulses and cravings for certain foods.

It's another late night and you're up trying to finish that last project for work so you can show your boss how organized and dedicated you are. You're a student and you're up late again working on extra credit homework trying to raise your GPA. You're a mom and after you've put the kids down for bed, you're rushing to finish up any office work, clean the house, make lunches for tomorrow, and somewhere in there spend time with your husband.

It doesn't matter who you are or what you do, in our world today there just aren't enough hours to do everything on our to-do lists. And when there's not enough time for everything, our sleeping hours are the first to go. Who needs sleep anyway? This is where Americans are making a huge mistake. We have cut down on our average nightly sleep time by almost two hours in the past 40 years. And since Americans cut down on sleep, they have gained weight. Today two out of three adults are overweight and one out of three is considered obese. Compare those numbers with the numbers from 1960: only one out of four adults was overweight and one of nine was considered obese.

A while ago Doctors began to see a relationship between shorter sleep time and a higher body mass index; however, no one could explain why. Now according to Dr. Shahrad Teheri, an endocrinologist at Bristol University, he has found an answer to this puzzling question. Using data from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort, which tracked the sleeping habits of 1,000 volunteers for the past 17 years, he found that the people who slept about five hours a night compared with people who slept eight hours a night, had a higher body mass index.