How Insomnia Affects Weight Gain

“Living a healthy lifestyle will only deprive you of poor health, lethargy, and fat.” Jill Johnson

Sleep is a powerful force on your overall health, including your tendency to gain excess weight. If you’re not taking your sleep needs seriously, you could be unknowingly sabotaging your weight. This is true not only if you sleep too little, but also if you sleep too much. The physiological functions of virtually all organisms are governed by 24-hour circadian rhythms. Your circadian clock is an essential time-tracking system, which your body uses to anticipate environmental changes and adapt to the appropriate time of day. Your circadian rhythm has evolved over hundreds of generations to align your physiology with your environment, and your body clock assumes that like your ancestors, you sleep at night and stay awake during daylight hours. If you confuse the situation by depriving yourself of enough hours of sleep, or even eating meals at odd hours (times at which your internal clock expects you to be sleeping), you send conflicting signals to your body. The body sets up that way that fat is needed to survive. If you’ve been eating right and staying active, but putting sleep on the sidelines, it may be time to reprioritize.