Could You Avoid Gaining Weight by Sleeping 8 Hours?

​According to research, yes.

​3 Examples How Sleep Helps in Avoiding Overweight

1. ​​Sleep Can Suppress the Hunger Feeling

​After you eat, it takes about 4 hours for your stomach to get empty enough so that your body starts secreting Gherlin, a hormone, which makes you feel hungry. If you had a dinner at 7 pm, you probably notice a need to eat by 23 pm. However, your body does not need extra energy to function well, and if you snack, most of the calories get directly converted into fat contributing to gaining weight. The situation would be totally the opposite if you could sleep: while you sleep, your body produces Leptin hormone, which suppresses the hunger feeling. The most ideal time for going to sleep is therefore 2-3 hours after the dinner.

2. ​Sleep Makes Energy Boosting Foods Unnecessary

​To avoid sleeping, it is common to fight tiredness with energy rich foods and drinks, easily exceeding our needs. Eating 100g chips or candy gives 300 calories, enough energy for 3 hour walk. However, during the evening we usually sit, which burns only about 100 calories per hour. The excess calories saturate our blood with glucose, needing safe processing, usually into fat.

3. ​Sleep Tempers Our Desire to Eat

​We all love to eat delicious food. Even we know we get too many calories, it is still hard to resist the temptation? What you feel is simply your brain’s neurological chatter. The desire to eat originates from the deeply rooted autonomic survival mechanisms, made to help us know the foods safe and nutritious for us. While we sleep, our mind calms down, and tempers our desire to eat.​

​A step further, benefits of 12-hour mild ketosis

If you are interested in getting the best out of the night time, you might like to try mini-fasting for at least 12 hours between the last meal of the evening and the first meal of the following morning. This also requires for at least 3 hours fasting between the dinner and bedtime. So, if you go to sleep at 10pm, you should finish dinner by 7pm with no snacking after that, only drinking water, which is also the best way to break the fast in the morning.

During a ketosis, your body switches to converting fat to ketone, which is another type of fuel your body can use as energy. While the body resorts to breakdown fats for energy, it means that blood glucose levels are considerably low but good for the well-functioning of the body. At this point, the body does not need to produce lots of insulin. As a result, also the insulin producing system can rest.

​Getting Better Sleep​

​If you have any questions, please leave a comment.

Sleep well!

Oliver