Sleep & Weight Connection

Do you want to lose weight. Your best bet might be to get more sleep.

The connection is it seems like the less you sleep, the more you eat, and of course the more you eat, the more weight you gain.

There's a long held belief that there's a close tie between sleeping and eating with some studies showing a tight connection between sleep and body mass index, or BMI. And if you've noticed over the last few decades we, as a society, have been sleeping less and gaining more weight. So researchers from France decided to look into the connection between the two to see if it's true.

Turns out, it is. These researchers used twelve normal weight men and had them sleep and eat. During the study they could eat as much as they wanted but were told how much to sleep, either four or eight hours.

When they only slept four hours, they also ended up eating 650 more calories. Surprisingly they only ended up eating more for breakfast and dinner but not for lunch.

The researchers involved in this study think part of the reason we eat more when we don't sleep is because our bodies are trained to store calories in the summer months, when nights are shorter and food is more plentiful. Their suggestion is simple, do your best to get adequate sleep to help fight the weight battle.