The weight-loss industry is reportedly worth $297.43 billion and is set to grow to nearly $600 billion by 2033, much of it fuelled by semaglutides such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which cost upwards of £150 per month. That means it’s not only your fatty deposits that’ll take a significant hit.
Thankfully, there is a more proven and natural way to cut weight – and that’s to maximise your sleep.
Nightmare obesity scenario
A growing body of evidence shows insufficient sleep doesn’t simply leave you wrestling with a cranky mood – it contributes to weight gain and heightens the risk of obesity.
Take a 2022 study by the Mayo Clinic, which revealed subjects who had their sleep restricted in the laboratory endured a 9 per cent increase in abdominal fat and an 11 per cent increase in visceral fat.
Visceral fat is the belly fat buried deep within your abdominal cavity. It protects your organs, but having too much leads to health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.
A further study into sleep and weight found women who slept for five hours per night were 32 per cent more likely to experience major weight gain (defined as 33lb or more) and 15 per cent more likely to become obese, over the course of the 16-year study, compared to women who slept for seven hours or more.
But why is this, and where do hormones come into it?
Optimise sleep, optimise hunger
“There’s a clear relationship between sleep and body mass,” says sleep expert Dr Sarah Gilchrist, whose book The Essential Guide to Women’s Sleep hits the shelves later this year.
“One of the major reasons why is that we make poor food choices, and a big driver of that is your hormones.”
“Take leptin, which is known as our ‘energy-expenditure hormone’,” Gilchrist adds. “It regulates appetite and is influenced by sleep. Reduced sleep means lower leptin levels and, in turn, greater hunger.
“Then there’s ghrelin. This is called the ‘hunger hormone’ because it increases the drive to eat. Ghrelin levels increase through lack of sleep, making us feel hungrier.
Basically, if you sleep poorly, you’ll have lower leptin and higher ghrelin levels, which will likely increase appetite and possibly explain the increased BMI [body mass index] observed with short sleep duration.”
A German study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, showed that just one night’s broken sleep raises ghrelin levels significantly, explaining why you might have hunger cravings when you’re tired. They also showed that two nights or more of poor sleep reduces leptin levels.
So, your appetite hormones (and mind) are scrambled through lack of sleep. That’s not great news for your weight and health.
And that’s not all – apologies, but we have further bad hormonal news.
“Poor sleep also lowers levels of testosterone,” says Gilchrist. “There’s clear evidence that this lowers muscle mass and increases fat mass. That’s bad enough, but that then leads to a further decrease in testosterone.
“If your body mass continues to increase, this can lead to a potential sleep disorder (sleep apnoea), which further reduces sleep quality and quantity, and the cycle continues.”
Insufficient sleep decreases levels of human growth hormone (HGH). HGH is predominantly released during deep sleep – aka slow wave sleep – but if this is low, so is HGH secretion, which isn’t great for your weight because HGH increases muscle mass and reduces fat mass.
There’s also evidence that poor sleep impacts other metabolic and endocrine processes. For instance, a decreased glucose tolerance, decreased insulin sensitivity and raised evening concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol.
There’s the psychological impact, too. We all know anecdotally that lack of sleep results in demotivation to undertake any activity that requires a hint of effort.
It isn’t fully understood why this is, but research suggests it’s down to your mind determining whether it has the resources needed to complete the task, deciding whether those resources are available or accessible, and whether those resources need to be used or conserved for tasks of higher priority.
Essentially, sleep deprivation alters the perception of this resource distribution and makes things feel tougher.
This fatigue perception is highlighted further by a 1995 study in the journal Sleep, where researchers deprived subjects of sleep for 48 hours.
Before and after the deprivation, the participants completed a series of physical tasks and, although they achieved the same level of physical result, the participants perceived that the workload had increased significantly.
Boost sleep, lose weight
It’s a bleak, sleep-deprived picture, but one that can be brightened. Which is what we’ll do now by rebooting your sleep and hormonal levels in an effort to lose a few pounds and retain your sanity.
How? Well, Gilchrist suggests that a cool, calm sleep environment, with a comfortable bed and the right temperature (around 18 to 20°C), will help, as will a sleep routine that’s as regular and consistent as it can be in your individual circumstances.
Those of you who struggle with sleep will no doubt have tried this lore of good sleep. If you have and it didn’t work, you must listen to Nick Littlehales.
Littlehales is a sleep expert who shot to prominence around 20 years ago after working with numerous sports teams, including Real Madrid and Manchester United in football and Team Sky in cycling.
Sleep is the best recovery tool we possess but, said Littlehales, these multi-million outfits were neglecting it.
Soon, the world’s finest sportspeople were sleeping on bespoke mattresses and toppers with portable air-conditioning units to keep the likes of Sir Bradley Wiggins at optimum sleep temperature when pursuing Tour de France glory.
Littlehales is a proponent of breaking sleep down into several 90-minute cycles rather than seeing it as one big chunk because, he says, the end of a sleep cycle is when the body and brain find waking easiest. Awaken mid-cycle and you’ve undone much of your good work.
“The ideal is individual but you’re looking at four or five 90-minute cycles, but key is that you plan to awake at the end of the cycle because you’ll feel fresher,” Littlehales says.
“So, say your wake time is 6.30am, aim to sleep by 11pm. That’s seven and a half hours, or five cycles. You can then adjust your sleep time if needed. If you have to be up early and can’t go to bed earlier, aim to sleep at 11pm and awake at 5am.
“That’s six hours, or four cycles. Conversely, if you feel you need more sleep, grab yourself an extra cycle by going to sleep at 9.30pm.”
Benefits of napping
Key to Littlehales’ R90 technique is to stop thinking of sleep in a monophasic way, he says. That means your sleep must come in one block. Instead, think of it as polyphasic – more than one – which is where napping comes in.
“A 30-minute nap is the ideal if you haven’t ticked off your optimum number of cycles,” says Littlehales. “The good thing is you don’t have to fall asleep; simply switching off your mind, by sitting down and simply chilling, helps.”
If you can squeeze in a 30-minute mental shutdown, aim to do it between 1pm and 3pm. That’s because of our natural mid-afternoon slump, which contrary to popular belief doesn’t derive from a big lunch.
Instead, it’s down to our body temperature, which follows a distinct rhythm where it peaks in the early evening and hits a trough about two to three hours before waking up in the morning.
But there’s also a small dip between the hours of 1pm and 3pm, which is called the post-prandial dip.
“A drop in body temperature will cause feelings of sleepiness,” says Littlehales, “so if you have had a bad or shortened night sleep then feelings of sleepiness during this period will be intensified in the majority of people.”
You can even enjoy a ‘nappuccino’, whereby you consume a caffeinated product before you nap, so you feel even more alert after the 30 minutes.
All of this is about making you more involved in ‘sleeping’ – you’re almost seeing it as a performance criteria like eating healthily and exercising – rather than simply waiting for it to happen.
To that end, Littlehales is a keen proponent of what he calls MRMs, or micro reset moments, where like napping, you do very little.
“My personal favourite is simply looking out of the window for a couple of minutes every hour or so,” he says.
“Just switch off and unwind. That’s so important to sleeping well and balancing out your hormones. Ultimately, the key is to be active regarding your sleep but not to put pressure on yourself.
“I remember when I worked with world-class cyclists years ago, we encouraged them to wear nasal strips to nose breathe at night and ideally help them sleep more proficiently.
“But you don’t need the extra tools as most of them are really not proven to work. These few simple steps and redefining how you see sleep will help you kip better and help you lose weight.”
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