Sleep Diet Lets You Lose Weight While Avoiding Impotence and Strokes

Weight loss ranks high on the list of broken New Year's resolutions, and the odds are good that if losing weight was on your list, you most likely have already registered some failures. Today there is again murmuring about the sleep diet. Is it for you?

Lose Weight While You Sleep

The promise of weight loss while sleeping is no longer the stuff of cheesy commercials hawking questionable dietary supplements by vendors that are out of business as quickly as they cropped up. Instead, WebMD reports that the sleep diet is indeed the result of copious research tying weight loss to healthy sleeping patterns.

The Skinny on the Sleep Diet

In simplest terms, hormones charged with the regulation of a healthy appetite are directly affected by the amount of sleep you enjoy each night, and the quality of your sleep. At issue are hormones named "ghrelin" and "leptin," which are said to directly influence a person's appetite. In turn, these hormones are tied to the body's quantity and quality of sleep.

According to the quoted research, while you sleep, leptin increases and ghrelin decreases. Leptin causes your brain to believe that you are sated after eating, while ghrelin is an active stimulant that can make your appetite work in overdrive. While you want more leptin, you most certainly do not want more ghrelin. Thus, if you sleep insufficiently or are frequently interrupted, you will wake up the next day ravenous for food, and never eating enough to feel full.

Control Weight with 7 to 8 Hours of Sleep per Night

It appears that the magic number of sleep is between seven and eight hours per night. This is the kind of sleep that is uninterrupted by a waling infant, a lumpy mattress, or an intermittent car alarm.

Losing Weight While You Sleep Is Not the Only Benefit of Snoozing

Science Daily reported three years ago that failure to get enough sleep may put you at risk for high blood pressure. In Australia, a Victoria Government website states that the overwhelming majority of middle age onset erectile dysfunction (impotence, in plain English) is traced back to insufficient sleep.

In short, while you are foregoing sleep to put food on the table and keep the home from foreclosing, you are gaining weight, setting yourself up for a stroke or heart attack, and if you are a man, most likely end up with erectile dysfunction. There is no happy spin to put on this.

Sources

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/lose-weight-while-sleeping; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060403230551.htm; http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Impotence?OpenDocument