Your Sleep Loss: Understand Its Weight Gain Impact

Now, insufficient sleep also correlates with more sedentary behavior. When you don’t sleep well, you are much less likely to work out. You have less motivation, and your mood tends to be negative. You often have irritability or anxiety and even depression. Sleep loss causes a drop in your core body temperature, and keeping your body temperature up is a major way that you burn calories. Sleep loss changes the way you process glucose or blood sugar. And cortisol, which is a stress hormone, is also increased. Finally, thyroid hormones can be dysregulated with sleep loss. These two factors create a situation where you have less energy expenditure, increased stress, and also decision fatigue as you’re trying to make choices about what to eat and how to get motivated to exercise. Now the combination of increased calorie intake and reduced energy expenditure with stress hormones and unhealthy food choices leads to weight gain. This is the way that sleep loss or sleep disruption, either due to untreated sleep apnea or even other causes, leads to weight gain.