A sleep medicine specialist explains how restless nights lead to consuming more calories and how you can use sleep as a tool for weight loss. A healthy diet and regular exercise have long been staples of weight management. But research shows that the role of sleep, which helps to regulate appetite hormones and calorie intake, is just as important. Absolutely! Sleep is inextricably linked to our biology and is important for every cell in the body. Work at the University of Chicago has challenged the brain-centered view of sleep. As far back as 1999, we published a paper that showed that healthy young men who did not have obesity or diabetes, when sleep-deprived in a laboratory setting, showed signs of prediabetes. And now we have the research to show that sleep is essential to regulating metabolism, appetite, and hormones. Lack of sleep increases our drive to eat. There are two main reasons that this could happen. The first is that when we are sleep-deprived, our brain’s reward centers are more active and drive us to seek rewards. These include food, particularly high-calorie, unhealthy food. Our ability to inhibit the impulse to eat is diminished. Wearables have allowed people to become more aware of their sleep needs and patterns by helping them to monitor their sleep passively. But they don’t necessarily know what to do with this information they’re getting about their sleep. What is missing are guided, personalized solutions to improve sleep for each individual. That is what we are working on in our new study. I think that, increasingly with wearables, people will start to see how their sleep is connected with other health parameters, such as heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation. They might notice that improvement on those metrics correlates with better sleep, which can, in turn, lead to a change towards healthier sleep behaviours. Getting enough sleep could help to tackle the obesity epidemic. Its impact could be particularly great for younger people. We know that the obesity epidemic is even more pronounced than it used to be in children and young people. Teenagers are sleep-deprived for various reasons, including heavy use of electronics, social media, video gaming, and, in some places, early school start times that work against teenagers’ natural circadian rhythms. To compensate for that sleep loss, they increase their food intake because they tend to be hungrier and reach for unhealthy foods, putting them on a high-risk trajectory for weight gain. So, stopping that weight-gain spiral before it starts, at an early age, through healthier sleep habits, has enormous public-health implications for prevention or reversal of obesity.
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Thursday, June 26, 2025