Sleep » sleep weight loss http://www.sleeponthecheap.com Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:51:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Forty winks and weight loss http://www.sleeponthecheap.com/forty-winks-and-weight-loss/ http://www.sleeponthecheap.com/forty-winks-and-weight-loss/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:51:18 +0000 sleep cheap http://www.sleeponthecheap.com/?p=18 Sleep contributes as much to our well-being as eating right and exercising, but the average American adult sleeps less than seven hours a night, compared to nine hours in 1910. Sleeping only five hours a night may change our appearance because of the link between obesity and insufficient sleep. Lack of sleep lowers leptin levels and raises ghrelin, two hormones that regulate appetite, according to a study at Stanford University. Skimping on sleep also increases the risk of developing type-2 diabetes, a lifestyle disease linked to weight gain.

“It sounds counter intuitive because you think you’re burning more calories by staying awake and active,” says Helene A. Emsellem, MD, director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and author of Snooze… or Lose!: 10 “No-War” Ways to Improve Your Teen’s Sleep Habits (National Academies Press, 2006). “But you need to sleep to properly metabolize the calories you take in during the day.”

Although not an official disease, chronic sleeplessness carries an annual health care cost of $16 billion and costs $50 billion in lost productivity. With numbers like these, an entire industry has emerged to treat the estimated 70 million sleep-deprived Americans. The big news in the snooze trade? The hottest sleep peddlers aren’t pharmaceutical companies or sleep clinics, but destination spas.

© Copyright Protected. All Rights Reserved. Previously published on healthwriting.com.

]]> http://www.sleeponthecheap.com/forty-winks-and-weight-loss/feed/ 0