Sleep More, Eat Less: 270 Fewer Calories a Day?
You might assume that sleeping more helps you eat less for the obvious reason: fewer waking hours means fewer hours to eat. Simple Math, right?
Couldn’t be further from the truth.
In reality, consistent high-quality sleep acts as a governor on your entire hunger, craving, and appetite apparatus — regulating the delicate balance of neurochemical, hormonal, and metabolic signaling that controls not just when you’re hungry, but what you crave and ultimately reach for. Spoiler alert: we don’t tend to choose the salad when we’re sleep deprived. But you probably already knew that.
And since a huge proportion of adults walk around chronically under-slept, that’s bad news for more than just our waistlines — it’s a hit to our cellular health too.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a relatively recent randomized controlled trial that asked a deceptively simple question: what happens to eating habits when you give chronically sleep-deprived people more sleep?
All I’ll say is… lazy people around the world may need to celebrate.
