Roblog

An interesting connection from Marie-Pierre St-Onge. Having too little sleep causes you to over-eat:

“Our work showed that reducing sleep by about four hours per night, for four nights, led to an increase in eating, amounting to about 300 calories per day (the equivalent of one McDonald’s cheeseburger). The cause, we found, is increased activity in the reward centres of the brain specific to food, along with alterations in hormones that control feelings of fullness. In other words, people who sleep less feel hungrier, and tend to crave foods that are high in sugar and fat.

…but poor diet also causes you to sleep poorly, creating a vicious cycle:

“Our studies over the past seven years have shown that eating more fibre and less saturated fat and sugar during the day results in deeper, less disturbed sleep at night.

“In the end, bad sleep and poor diet can be a vicious cycle: lack of sleep leads to poor dietary choices, which in turn causes low quality sleep.”

It’s easier to fix your diet than to magically improve your sleep, so St-Onge recommends starting there.