Lose Weight While You Sleep!

Dr. Oz video offers advice for how to sleep better


Sleep your way thin! Sure, it sounds too good to be true, but substantial medical evidence suggests that there are important links between the amount and quality of sleep one gets and weight loss. Don’t think you’re getting enough? This video from cardiac surgeon and television show host, Dr. Mehmet Oz has some pointers for how to sleep better.

In fact, a commentary by researchers at Laval University in Quebec on the research done on this subject points to different studies that drive this point home. In one study cited, research participants decreased their calorie intake and one group got five and half hours of sleep each night while the other got eight and half hours. The group that slept for a full eight and a half hours lost more body fat than those who slept five and a half hours.

What’s at work here are the body’s hormones. Have you ever pulled an all-nighter and wanted nothing but junk food to satiate your extreme hunger the entire next day? If so, you’ve been a victim to the hormones grehlin and leptin, which affect feelings of hunger and fullness, respectively. Grehlin stimulates appetite while leptin sends a signal to the brain when you are full. Sleep deprivation causes leptin levels to go down and grehlin levels to go up, meaning that the appetite is stimulated but the brain isn’t registering that the body is full. Put simply: you’ll want to eat all day and you still won’t feel satisfied.

The American Sleep Association recommends that adults get seven to eight hours of sleep each night. Learn how to get them with this video from Dr. Oz.