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Only a few lucky persons possess a beautiful figure in today's busy routine even after gulping down unnecessary junk food. Either they have got wonderful basic metabolic rate or they manage to take out enough time to maintain their weight. If you are one of the millions who desire to lose weight then you need to count not only your calories but also your sleep. Yes! Sleep too, as it enhances weight loss. You must take proper sleep in fact a little more than normal if you want to see an expedited weight loss.
Today's major health issues like obesity & weight loss has given rise to many clinical studies, few of them have revealed that sleep deprivation interferes with a series of metabolism and hormonal processes. These disrupted processes results in increased hunger and affects the body's metabolism. All these things together make it difficult to loose or control weight.
You must be curious to know that how sleep deprivation interferes with successful weight loss program. Well, when our body is deprived of sleep, brain instructs an appetite controlling hormone called cortisol to take excess calories and store them as excess body fat. Moreover, lack of sleep also interrupts the carbohydrate metabolism which may result into increased blood glucose levels. This heightened glucose encourages the overproduction of insulin leading to diabetes and obesity.
Further studies have shown that lack of sleep can discourage weight loss by heavily affecting our behavior. Sleep deprivation causes people to crave more for sweets or high carbohydrate & high fat food than people who have proper sleep. Such people are more inclined to snacking on cakes, chips, pastries, ice-creams, burgers, fries, soft drinks, etc. Though it is true that intake of these snacks cause a short-term rise in blood sugar and so a temporary surge of energy but the extra calories are not required by the body and hence are stored as body fat.
Shedding these extra calories is far more difficult than taken. People who are sleep deprived feel tired all the time as a result exercise or work out don't even appear in there dreams. Such people feel exhausted even with little work. Lack of energy & lessened motivation discourages them to do even simple exercises. They would like to sleep or eat rather than going physical. In due time, the gained calories are left unburned and thus deposited in the body as fat.
Sleep need may vary from person to person. If some people may feel energized after getting less hours of sound sleep, some may need more than 10 hours to feel at the top condition to work out energetically whole day. But experts settle on normal sound sleep duration of eight hours each night to attain enough energy to exercise, eat appropriate and keep off those unwanted extra pounds. However, recent surveys has shown that 50 percent of working people get eight or more hours of sleep on weeknights; while 40 percent do on weekends. One third of population was found to sleep no more than six-and-a-half hours nightly.
WE should accept this hard and true fact that increasing busy routine has decreased the sleeping hours & disrupted the sleeping patterns in the industrialized world, resulting into more of overweight populations. So, presently, the only way out to keep a balance comes in form of some behavioral and lifestyle changes that people should go for in order to have an improved and healthier future. |
