Although health experts agree to the fact that sleep is as important to weight loss as dieting and a lack of it causes weight gain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that people in the United States still struggle to get enough sleep every night. A study revealed that there is something people can do in order to sleep better; lose weight through dieting.
Although many people feel that they are at a healthy weight, and that they can't sleep for a few other reasons, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine unveiled that no matter what your body weight is, losing weight will help you get better sleep. Study's lead author, Isaac Perron, a PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, released a statement saying that the study's findings imply that body weight is not an important factor than changes in weight to regulate sleepiness.
To prove their theory, they turned to obese mice which they divided into two groups for 8 weeks. One group of mice was handed a normal amount of food to eat, while the second group ate had a food which included three times more fat than their normal diet. In the span of eight weeks, the researchers changed some of the mice's diets for another week, which made them lose and gain weight respectively, while the remaining mice stayed on the same diet they had for 8 weeks.
After the 9th week, the researchers discovered that the mice on the high fat diet during the entire experiment weighed 30% more than the other mice, and slept more than an hour longer than others, too. But the sleep was broken, and that the mice experienced deep sleep less frequently. At the same time, he groups of mice whose diets were switched, has the same body weight but had a completely different sleep schedules.
The researchers found those mice that were on a regular diet, then changed to a high-fat diet, had a reduced sleeping time, an increase in non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and similar sleep fragmentation to those mice who stayed in the same diet for 9 weeks. The mice whose diet was switched from high-fat to a regular one was found to have better sleep and also lost weight.
