Relationship Between Sleep and Weight

[Steven Y Park, MD]

Ranaesheart posted on my article "Can the Recession Make You Fat?" and alerted me to your community. It's surprising how much we know about the interrelatedness of sleep, appetite and weight, but sleep is seldom mentioned. This month in Glamour Magazine, there's an article where they profile a handful of women whose only goal was to sleep for 7.5 hours regularly. After a few months, they all lost significant weight. (I also got in a quote in this article as well :)

How many hours do you sleep?

[Ranaesheart]

We are indeed fortunate to have Dr Park visit our community and share his knowledge about how the lack of sleep can affect our appetite and weight.  

After reading his article this morning, I posted a thread in the WL&D community where you can find the link to his article, "Can The Recession Make You Fat?"  Some of our teammates have added comments there and hope you will consider doing the same on all the threads.  http://www.medhelp.org/posts/show/778242 ; 

Personally, this has been very enlightening and I am going to make an attempt to start trying to get some more rest.  I have been holding fairly steady, up and down within the same few pounds, but not really losing as I had hoped.  I've also been sleeping 4-6 hours a night and I am taking note of the correlation Dr Park mentions.  

Think I should start a sleep tracker and track my hours of sleep and compare it to my weight tracker.  This is just another tool for us in our continued effort to lose weight, take better care of ourselves and be healthier.

A big thank you to Dr Park for sharing his expertise and to MedHelp for providing the tools, forums and communities that aid us in our efforts.  

And, thank YOU .. community members .. for being so courageous and always being so supportive, caring, and encouraging to each other.  None of this would be possible without YOU!

WE CAN DO THIS ... TOGETHER !!!  

[Got_To_Do_It]

Sleep has always been a part of my plan -  My uneducated opinion has been that the digestive system needs time to slow down, to fully digest what is in it and to relax a little without added food or drink being put into it....

Also as I belive weight loss and healthy eating is 90% about mindset -  adequate sleep means my emotional state is better and I am less likely to 'graze'

[Barb135]

Sleep has been a major problem for years, but especially the past 2-3.  The problem is that I generally fall asleep right away, but wake up after a couple hours and can't go back to sleep so I toss and turn for a couple more hours (or longer) and about the time I get back into a deep sleep, the alarm goes off (as a lot of you know, I have to get up at 3:30 am) and it's time to get up and do it all over again.  

I know the major portion of my weight gain was due to undiagnosed thyroid condition, then unbalanced thyroid.  Now, although I am on different meds and do feel much better and have a lot more energy, I am still not losing as much weight as I had hoped.  I can't help wondering if this is partly due to sleep issues, which right now, are due to both stress and meds.  

I'm with Ranae - I think I might set up the sleep tracker and see if there could be a problem them that's causing other problems.  I make every effort to get to bed in plenty of time to allow for an 8 hours sleep, but I can't remember the last time I fell asleep and stayed asleep until it was time to get up.  

Thank you Dr Park for sharing your expertise.  

[Got_To_Do_It]

It's not a 'cover all' as with most things-  sleep has t be taken in with everything else effecting your health/life.

When my son was home he only ever slept 3-4 hours out of 24 (He has Downs Syndrome and Autism) he was hyper the other 21 hours a day  - so for 10 years the most sleep I had was 3 hours a night -  It made me an insomniac but I was still thin -  my weight problems didn't hit till Dave went into a residential school -  I found me time and began a relationship with a man who liked to eat out a lot... Suddenly I had time to eat and enjoy eating and put on 50lb in one year it never came off -  but more went on -  I was always 144lbs and went to 195lbs in that one year and then slowly rose to 220lbs.... I am now back to  173lbs with a goal of  140-154lbs.

It took my 8 years to learn to sleep again -  now I can get 6-7 hours on a  good night.

[twehner5]

Thank you, Dr. Park, for visiting our community.  I missed this last night because I was getting my SLEEP!

Since we got a puppy 3 weeks ago, I've averaged 6-7 hours of sleep.  Before that, I was pretty "religious" about getting 7.5-8 hours of sleep each night.  I have been fatigued beyond reason, though, so the sleep has not really been planned, but almost forced.  I'm still tired during the day.

This week, for some reason, I am waking up between 1 and 1:30 and staying awake until 3 or so.  I get up at 4:45 for work.  I am no more tired than usual.  Just one of my bouts of insomnia, which I get very rarely (thank goodness).

[lucindamartinez]

Thank you for your visit to our community Dr. Parker.  I have long-since been a terrible sleeper all together.  I'm one of those that falls asleep immediately, but is up every hour to two hours throughout the night.  I do finally get a good solid three hours straight before time to get up.  I have long since felt that the sleep disturbances that I experience made me more prone to illness, but I had not correlated that to difficulties with my weight before.  This is something that I shall have to investigate further.  Thanks again!