Could getting just One More Hour of Sleep a Night help you Lose Weight?

To be more successful when it comes to weight loss goals, the secret may be a good night’s sleep. New research suggests that an extra hour of sleep every night could help sleep-deprived people who are overweight eat 270 fewer calories per day without even trying. Participants in the new study were not asked to restrict calories and did not even know that calorie intake was being measured for the trial, as it was done by analysis of urine samples the participants thought were being collected to measure other things.

That translates to nearly nine pounds of weight loss over a year, according to the researchers behind the study, published February 7 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. “A decrease of 270 calories a day is tremendous. This is clinically important, and it’s also highly significant for people on weight loss programs,” says the lead author of the study, Esra Tasali, MD, an associate professor of medicine and the director of the Sleep Research Center at the University of Chicago.

This study is not the first to connect sleep with eating patterns. Despite a growing body of evidence suggesting, like this new study, that adequate sleep helps people stick to a healthy diet (in terms of quantity and quality of calories consumed), sleep still doesn’t tend to be part of weight loss conversations — even those that happen between doctors and their patients.

But that’s changing, says James Rowley, MD, a professor of critical care and sleep medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. “For many years, sleep just was not considered part of the ‘equation’ so to speak,” he says. Now there is growing recognition that sleep needs to be considered as an important component of cardiovascular health, metabolic health, and exercise and eating, he explains. “It’s clear that adequate sleep is important for overall health.”

He says he’s already started to recommend more sleep to aid in weight loss and weight maintenance in his own practice. And he says that this new research is an important piece of the puzzle, reinforcing the effect improved sleep quantity can have on calorie consumption.

The extra sleep isn’t just about having one less hour to snack, according to Marie Pierre St-Onge, PhD, an associate professor of nutritional medicine and the director of the Sleep Center of Excellence at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She says the study adds to a growing body of research that suggests sleep plays a major role in appetite, satiety, and hunger cues.

Dr. St-Onge’s previous research, which she says is one of the largest studies on sleep restriction, found that people running on just four hours of sleep per night eat more the next day — to the tune of an extra 300 calories. That result is similar to the findings in the study from Tasali’s group, St-Onge says. “It’s possible that these same mechanisms are just going in reverse with sleep extension.”

Other evidence suggests that conversely, getting less sleep makes you hungrier, eat more, and therefore gain weight. Sleep deprivation increases levels of ghrelin, nicknamed the “hunger hormone” because it increases food intake; and other research has shown that lack of sleep decreases levels of leptin, which is a hunger-suppressing hormone. Previous research Tasali worked on, published in the journal Obesity in January 2016 also found that sleep-deprived people had increased levels of ghrelin.

Sleep-deprived people also tend to crave salty, sweet, fat-dense food, St-Onge says. The reward centers of the brain light up in response to junk food, according to previous findings.

Together, this previous research and this new study bolster the notion that sleeping well should be part of a weight loss or weight maintenance plan. “If you’re trying to lose weight, it would be a bad idea to be sleep deprived,” St-Onge says. “You need to make sure you’re well rested so you can make good decisions in all aspects of your life, including what kinds of food you eat.”

Tasali says she and her team hope their work will help get this message out. “We believe — hopefully — our study could be a game changer for our battle with the obesity epidemic in our society. It’s really about using sufficient sleep as a simple tool that can be really successful,” Tasali says.

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