Sleep

I read an interesting article today from the NPR blog about sleep and its affects on body composition, particularly adipose tissue's response to insulin. You can read the full article, you can go here.
The point of the article is that if you don't sleep enough, you're going to gain weight or at the best you're not going to lose weight. I think when people make decisions to lose weight or get in shape, they spend a lot of time worrying about their diet and fitness. They painstakingly count calories, cut out favorite foods, carve out time to work out (sometimes even getting up super early to do that) but they never think about going to bed earlier. At the clinic where I work, we see a lot of patients who want to lose weight. They've tried every diet and they work out religiously, but when you ask them about their daily lives, you find that they sometimes are getting a measly 5-6 hours of sleep a night! Yikes. Considering the study that was done in the aforementioned article says a mere 8 days of consistently getting too little sleep can have massive impacts on your fat cells, think about how much damage we are doing to ourselves by routinely getting this little sleep! I hear a lot of people say, "but I can't go to bed early, I have too much to do!" I know that we all have busy lives, but when you ask the average person how many hours of television they watch a night, or how much time they spend on the computer, you realize that there are extra hours in the day and many of us should spend that time in bed!