Sleep and lose weight: two activities that run on parallel tracks

Sleeping is good, it's well known. But if someone told you that sleeping makes you lose weight, would you start laughing? You are wrong. It seems that sleep also makes you lose weight. Authoritative studies and research, also reported by the American Journal International Journal of Obesity, show that the more you sleep, the more you lose weight. On the contrary, little sleep favors the increase of obesity, starting from early childhood.

Why does falling into the arms of Morpheus also make you lose weight? Sleeping makes you lose weight first of all because we have less banal stimulation to eat, in fact a reduction in sleep leads to an increase in appetite and a reduction in the basal metabolism of fat, with a consequent increase in weight and fat deposits in the body. But things are actually a little more complex. The relationship between sleep and weight loss is in fact explained thanks to the influence of two hormones, the ghrelin, with an orising action, and leptin, with an anorectic action.

Sleeping increases the level of the hormone that makes us lose weight

Let us look more closely at the relationship between sleep, weight loss and the two appetite hormones. Ghrelin is a hormone produced by P-D1 cells that are found at the bottom of the human stomach and is responsible for stimulating appetite. In practice, send a clear message that starts from the stomach and reaches the brain: "I'm hungry"!

Leptin is instead a hormone that is secreted by fat cells, when their fat content is high. The message that leptin sends to the brain, again through the hypothalamus, is of another type: "I am no longer hungry, we consume the energy of supply!".

The consequence is that a high level of leptin makes you lose weight, as it increases the metabolism of fat and consumes fat deposits, while a high level of ghrelin makes you fat, because it stimulates your appetite. Sleep is directly linked to the mechanism described above, as it has been shown that in the absence of sleep the leptin levels are reduced, while those of gerlina increase. Conversely, sleeping well and abundantly produces high quantities of leptin.

How much sleep do you need to lose weight?

To ensure that the body does its job, that the body therefore produces its hormones in a balanced way, an adult should sleep on average from 6 (minimum) to 9 hours per night . This ensures that the fat consumption described above occurs naturally.

Go ahead then to adjuvant herbal teas, to a diet for a good sleep combined with properly programmed activities during the day so that the yawn arises spontaneously and to sleep well, without finding ourselves in the evening in bed looking at the ceiling, counting endless sheep or reading for all night long!