Losing sleep makes it harder to lose body fat, says study

Even when cutting calories helps people lose weight, they may have a harder time getting rid of excess body fat if they don’t get enough sleep, a small experiment suggests. Over eight weeks, researchers asked 15 overweight and obese adults to focus only on cutting calories and another 21 participants to both cut calories and get less sleep.

Dieters in the sleep-restriction group lost about an hour of rest on each weeknight and then got an extra hour of shuteye on Saturdays and Sundays. By the end of the experiment, people in both groups had lost about 7 pounds (3.2 kilograms). But in the sleep-restriction group, people lost less fat tissue and more lean muscle.  “People who want to lose weight, and lose fat in particular, need to avoid sleep loss during the week because you cannot make up for lost sleep on weekends,” said Kristen Knutson, a sleep researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study. “Of course, calorie restriction and exercise are both very important for weight loss and weight maintenance, but these results among others suggest that sleep also needs to be considered,” Knutson said.

Sleep deprivation has long been linked to an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese, and inadequate sleep has been linked to difficulties with weight loss, Xuewen Wang of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues note in the journal Sleep. Most of the participants in the current study were women, and more than half were African-American. They were 45 years, old on average, and had a body mass index (a measure of weight relative to height) in the obese range. Without sleep restriction, people typically got about 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep each night before the experiment and continued to do so once the experiment started. In the sleep restriction group, people got about 6 to 6.5 hours of sleep on weeknights and about 8 to 9 hours of sleep nightly on weekends. All of the participants picked up prepared lunches and dinners for four days each week and received sample meal plans and help from a registered dietician.

“Drastically cutting sleep has been shown to increase food intake and now there is increasing evidence that sleep loss can have counter-productive effects for weight management,” St-Onge said. Ideally, people trying to lose weight should get about 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night, St-Onge added. More sleep than this isn’t necessary to lose weight, but people who typically get less than this may want to start getting more rest if they’re overweight or obese. “If sleep is inadequate, this may be a reason for the extra weight,” St-Onge said. “To promote better sleep at night, shut down electronic devices a few hours before bedtime, dim room lights, avoid caffeine and other stimulants in the evening, set a cool bedroom temperature, reduce noise and get some exercise during the day.”