RQ: How does the amount of sleep a person gets affect their total body mass?
Background Information:
Insufficient sleep impacts your hunger and fullness hormones, including two called ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin signals your brain that it’s time to eat. When you’re sleep-deprived, your body makes more ghrelin.
Leptin, on the other hand, cues your brain to put the fork down. When you’re not getting enough sleep, leptin levels plummet, signaling your brain to eat more food. Put the two together, and it’s no wonder sleep deprivation leads to overeating and extra pounds. Then there’s the cortisol spike that comes from too little sleep. This stress hormone signals your body to conserve energy to fuel your waking hours. This means that you’re more apt to hang on to fat.
Researchers found that when dieters cut back on sleep over a 14-day period, the amount of weight they lost from fat dropped by 55%, even though their calories stayed equal. They felt hungrier and less satisfied after meals, and their energy was zapped.
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Within just 4 days of insufficient sleep, your body’s ability to process insulin -- a hormone needed to change sugar, starches, and other food into energy -- goes askew. Insulin sensitivity, the researchers found, dropped by more than 30%. Here’s why that’s bad: When your body doesn't respond properly to insulin, your body has trouble processing fats from your bloodstream, so it ends up storing them as fat. So it’s not so much that if you sleep, you’ll lose weight, but that too little sleep hampers your metabolism and contributes to weight