How Sleep Reduces Your Body Fat

Not sleeping enough (less than 7 hours of sleep per night) can reduce and undo the benefits of health and fitness.  In a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, people who were trying to lose weight were put on different sleeping schedules. The people who cut back on sleep lost half the weight than the people who had an adequate amount of rest.

When your body is sleep deprived, it suffers from “metabolic grogginess.” Within just 4 days of sleep deprivation, your body’s ability to properly use insulin becomes completely disrupted. When your insulin is functioning well, fat cells remove fatty acids and lipids from your blood stream and prevent storage. When you become more insulin resistant, fats (lipids) circulate in your blood and pump out more insulin. Eventually, this excess insulin ends up storing fat in all the wrong places, such as tissues like your liver. This is often the reason people gain weight.

Hunger is controlled by leptin and ghrelin. The less leptin your produce, the more your stomach feels empty. The more ghrelin you produce, the more you stimulate hunger while also reducing the amount of calories you burn (your metabolism) and increasing the amount of fat you store. A lack of sleep makes keeping these hormones in control nearly impossible. When you don’t sleep enough, there is an increase of activity in your amygdala (the reward region of your brain).

A lack of sleep is the enemy of your muscles, which help you burn fat and stay young. If there is muscle loss, this can lead to a higher risk for injury. Sleep deprivation makes it more difficult for your body to recover from exercise because it slows down the production of the growth hormone.