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If you want to lose weight, make sure to get your beauty sleep. A new study published in the most recent issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine has found a link between fat loss and sleep. 10 overweight or obese subjects were divided into two groups. One group got 5.5 hours of sleep per night while the other got 8.5 over two separate periods of two weeks. Both groups had the same activity level and caloric intake.
While members lost the same amount of weight, the group who got only 5.5 hours of sleep lost more lean body mass rather than fat. According to abcnews.go.com, one of the study's authors, Dr. Plamen Penev said, "The loss of lean body mass is an unwanted side-effect of all weight loss diets. This side effect was increased by sleep reduction in our study."
Experts in the field of weight loss and sleep say that this points to a connection between sleep and metabolism which they'd previously suspected. Further, researchers found that the balance of the hunger related hormones leptin and ghrelin were affected by sleep loss. "The longer you're awake, the hungrier you get," said Dr. Nancy Collop, professor of medicine and director of the Emory Sleep Center in Atlanta, Ga.
