Is the link due to?
1. Lack of sleep messing up metabolism and hormones or body recovery?
2. Lack of sleep being an additional problem caused by something else (Stress, overwork, bad diet, etc.), thus lack of sleep becomes more of a sign, and less of a cause, of obesity creating problems?
3. The behavior of those that lack sleep? They’re stressed out, impulsive, prolly work shitty jobs with no free time and therefore gravitate to, or are only provided, fattening junk?
4. Any combination of the three?
I read an article saying night owls die earlier and it just goes on to say “We ALL know night owls drink beer and alchohol, which causes problems” like I’ve never drunk in my life, that wasn’t a genuine study. Is there a similar thing here?
In: Biology
Combination, but the circadian clock, energy management and sleep homeostasis are tied together in the nervous system into one glorious jumbled mess, so there’s direct connections on fairly low (physiological) level.
Note that decent studies in humans should control for many factors in 2, 3; and we’re seeing the connections mentioned above while studying mice and such (most animals really, down to the humble C. elegans more likely than not, but I’m not up to date on worm rhythm neuroscience). And lab mice don’t get to go to the pub.
Hi, I’m a big human and recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. I’m almost 40yo and I only just learned the intrinsic union between sleep and your hormones / metabolism.
Being fat can cause poor sleep. But poor sleep can also cause you to get fat.
Though not a direct answer to your query, this is very relative. When you sleep and can’t breathe well, your body is effectively starving for oxygen. Whenever your body starves for anything it needs to survive, it goes in to emergency mode to salvage and hang on to everything it can in order to survive. This starving of oxygen also affects your cortisol hormones. Which triggers fight or flight responses cause your body is being attacked by not getting what it critical needs. Cortisol also PACKS on fat cells, again, your bodies way of hanging on to everything it can to protect itself just in case you never get calories again.
So when you’re starved of oxygen your brain does all kinds of things, it slows metabolism to help your body systems run on dormant mode (packing the fat cells full while using them way too slowly)
There is also ample evidence that if you don’t get good sleep (thru all healthy sleep stages) your body never fully rests and it’s burning out your ability to perform daily repairs to your metabolism / cell turnover / hormone cycles.
Also, you can totally have apnea as a thin ‘healthy’ person. Folks often don’t realize they have apnea cause they’re asleep! You might wake up multiple times a night thinking you have to pee or roll over, when your body was actually jolted awake by you choking.
Case in point, I lost 25lbs the month I started using my CPAP. I didn’t diet or make any changes beyond I was breathing better during my sleep cycles. I have more energy, and I can tell that my hormones are regulating more (periods have been like clockwork since I began)
Wild that they don’t educate us better in how imperative sleep and sleep health / apnea is until it’s already a big problem.
Real easy to explain. Do you move more when you feel tired or well rested? Moving more burns more calories.
For anything to gain mass, you need molecules.
You cannot gain weight without introducing new molecules into your body.
You can have the worst sleep in the world but if you’re starving, you’re not gonna gain a single pound.
Most people aren’t starving though, they’re just living life and they’re tired. So an extra Starbucks drink here, an extra snack there – to keep up energy in the day due to poor sleep, and you can easily add 500 calories extra in a day that you wouldn’t otherwise need.
If every day you eat 500 extra calories, you would have reached 3500 excess calories you don’t need by the end of that week – that’s equal to one pound.
If you keep that up for the entire year, that’s 50 pounds.
That’s how poor sleep “causes” weight gain. No one who is chronically tired has any chance of managing their diet.
When one sleeps a lot less they are awake more and more likely to get hungry and thirsty as the day goes on. Therefore, they’ll eat more to satisfy the hunger and thirst. Someone who sleeps longer would be in bed asleep at the time the awake person would be hungry and eating.
If you eat more kcal than you need, the excess is stored as fat. So if the answer was:
>Lack of sleep messing up metabolism and hormones or body recovery
Then people would lose weight, as anything messing up the body wouldn’t be able to store anything, that part would be malfunctioning.
>The behavior of those that lack sleep
It’s this. If everything is functional, fat gain isn’t a health issue, its expected body chemistry. Things are working *just fine* if you’re able to store body fat. [Heres someone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Velásquez ) where that functionality is messed up, genetically.
People might be able to make claims of hardship from lacking sleep, irritability. Sure, life sucks. You’re still not a dog, don’t reward yourself with food.
There’s a lot of reasons, some that have been covered already. Another is that your hunger hormones are regulated by sleep. There’s some research that show leptin (the hormone that helps you control ghrelin, an hormone that makes you hungry) is affected by sleep. If you sleep, you’re less hungry because you are more likely to have appropriate levels of leptin and ghrelin. If you don’t, ghrelin makes you more hungry.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that metabolism is literally downregulated in the sense that your total daily energy consumption is lower (at least for common sleep deprivation in the general population). However, it does absolutely fuck with hormones. This, in turn, makes it much harder to balance your caloric intake and makes you hungrier, along with having less self-control. Most people don’t log and monitor their calorie consumption, so they end up eating a lot more (which there is direct evidence of).
So essentially it’s a behavior alteration issue.
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