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Sleep Less, Eat More?
Ant writes "A study, published Monday, found that people who sleep less tend to be fat, and experts said it's time to find if more sleep will fight obesity. Monday's study from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk covered 1,000 people and found that total sleep time decreased as body mass index -- a measure of weight based on height -- increased. Men slept an average of 27 minutes less than women and overweight and obese patients slept less than patients with normal weights, it said. In general the fatter subjects slept about 1.8 hours a week less than those with normal weights."
I have sleep apnea and I will testify before you all that because of significant sleep deprivation during my youth, I had to eat foods that were:
a) Rich in sugar or grease
b) Fast and easy to prepare
If these conditions aren't met, I could not function very well, even with CPAP.
I was born with an unusually narrow throat, and I spent most of my early childhood as a beanpole -- I was super skinny. But after years of chronic apnea, due to the OSA, I slowly grew... and then suddenly I became super-sized.
I would daydream in class (ie: getting my waking REM), and even fall asleep during lectures.
I had zero energy, so I drank a pot of coffee in the morning and one in the afternoon, along with cigarettes to speed my heart up and get me going. I could never have graduated from school without doing this. Society requires that everyone must perform at a uniformed level, unless you have a disability, but my disability was never discovered until I was 30yrs. That's 30yrs of health slippage....
The point is... people with sleeping disorders need to have the disorders fixed, but the current CPAP machines are really not a solution -- they aren't ready to combat the seasons properly and they are horrible for people with dust allergies.
Until a solution for apnea is found and people realize that being overweight is not the cause, but a symptom -- people with apnea and other sleeping disorders won't be very healthy (mentally, emotionally or physically).
Some of it might have to do with the relationship between obesity and lack of exercise. When I am on a regular exercise regime, I find myself forced to sleep 7 or 8 hours a night rather than 5 or 6 -- otherwise I feel completely exhausted. Sedentary people may be able to get by on less sleep than the physically active.
Without having read TFA, I can already say that this is fairly obvious if you think about it.
When you start to get tired, you feel low-energy. When you feel low-energy, you eat "quick energy" foods - those that are readily metabolized and high in calories. It's your body saying "Oh, crap! We don't have enough energy right now! Do something about it!" (This is due to falling glucose levels in the brain as you get tired, but I'm sure that's covered in TFA.)
Of course, you don't really need the energy, you need sleep. The result is that you take in waaay more calories than your body actually uses. The more sleep deprived you are, the more this happens.
It makes me wonder if there's a causal relationship between the decreasing amount of sleep your average American (and, indeed, member of any industrialized nation) gets and the increases seen in obesity.
That green slime had it coming.
Maybe, but I would suspect that stress may play a role: inadequate sleep means a stressed organism. Stress messes with body chemistry in ways that have been linked to obesity - and obesity itself is a stressor, creating a feedback loop. People also often turn to "comfort food" when stressed.
There have been high-stress low-sleep times in my life when I've tried to substitute food for sleep; fortunately I was aware enough to see what I was doing and restore my old eating habits after the stress had passed and sleep patterns were more normal.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood