Insomnia, or lack of sleep, makes you more prone to Type 2 diabetes, among other conditions such as depression, chronic fatigue, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
Results of research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine points out anyone who sleeps five or fewer hours each night are two and a half times more likely to develop impaired glucose tolerance or insulin resistance.
Lack of sleep is not a pretty thing.
That's not just talking about the dark shadows or bags that form under a person's eyes when said (bloodshot) eyes are not shut often enough, either! Sleep deprivation is bad for your skin, for your mental state, and it can even make you gain weight.
The ways that lack of sleep packs on the pounds or kilograms are subtle and myriad, but they conspire with one another to make you increasingly rotund over time.
While you may be able to "tough it out" for a while, in time, sleep deprivation makes many a person gain unnecessary weight.
And the "Yang": Ghrelin is a chemical which is released from the stomach at certain times.
This simple chemical has been called the yang of eating, because it tells your brain that you are in need of energy.
The simple solution to this problem is to eat something...
not too complicated.
Unfortunately, sleeping is a key component of whether ghrelin is released or not.
In one study, after only two nights of four hours of sleep, participating men were extremely hungry.
However, after having ten hours available for sleep, the very same men reported no such intense hunger.
The result of tests like this is that sleeping for longer amounts of time allows a person to eat less, and thus causes them not to gain weight as would a sleep deprived individual.
The "Yin": Another important chemical in your body's constant need to keep an energy balance is produced in the hypothalamus, and is called leptin.
Leptin is known as the yin of hunger, because it is the chemical which suppresses your desire to eat.
It is quite possible that some day a company will make billions of dollars by producing and selling a pill filled with either leptin itself, or a leptin stimulant.
It would be all natural, would have no adverse side effects (unless you took too much, and ended up nearly starving to death), and it might solve the weight crisis our society faces.
Until that time, you need to sleep in order to have enough leptin going where it needs to go, and keeping you from craving a three foot high stack of pancakes in the morning.
Less sleep, more food eaten: Another, less obvious reason why a person who sleeps less will often pack on the pounds is that a lack of sleep causes a human brain to default to dogmatic thought patterns.
Dogmatic individuals do not perceive a lot of the things that more well rested people do.
For instance, they may believe that they need to eat more than they do...
or worse, they may starve themselves all day, and then gorge at dinner.
And they also might not think much about the portion sizes they take in.
Altogether, there is a lot to suggest that not sleeping means lots of eating.
So get at least 8 hours of sleep every night! Exercise, diet, blood sugar testing...
and sleep! You might not have expected to see sleep as part of your program to help with weight loss, but it has a strong impact on your blood sugar levels.