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Skimping on sleep leads to weight gain at the rate of one pound (453 grams) in six weeks, a small study suggests.
Experts from Columbia University in New York found that shortening the amount of sleep by 80 minutes nightly led to one pound on average weight gain, and people were more likely to spend time sitting down and being sedentary.
“Our study shows that getting adequate sleep may help reduce the risk of weight gain and obesity-related conditions like heart disease and diabetes,” says study leader Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine in both Columbia’s department of medicine and its Institute for Human Nutrition.
“People tend to gain weight over the course of their adulthood, and obesity is a major risk factor for heart disease.”
Previous studies have shown that severe sleep deprivation in the short term leads to changes in appetite and overeating, which can contribute to weight gain. Research has also shown that adults who generally sleep less than seven hours a night have higher odds of being obese than those who sleep seven to eight hours a night.
However, the researchers wanted to look at a more realistic scenario, where people lost more than an hour of sleep over a longer period of time.
“These [previous] studies only show us what happens under the most extreme conditions and don’t tell us if mildly sleep-deprived people, like a lot of Americans who get five or six hours of sleep a night, will gain weight,” St-Onge says.

To investigate the more realistic scenario, which the team thinks affects about a third of adults, some 95 adults who usually got seven or eight hours of sleep were recruited.
All were told to delay their normal bedtime by 90 minutes for six weeks and to get the usual amount of sleep for the following six weeks.
The participants wore a wrist monitor to track sleep. Changes in body weight, waist circumference and body composition, as well as fasting levels of several hormones known to increase or suppress appetite, were also recorded.
“While the one-pound weight gain observed with modest sleep curtailment is not overwhelming, it is important to remember this is occurring over just six weeks,” says Faris Zuraikat, assistant professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia and first author of the study.
“Our study was designed to mimic sleep patterns that most adults experience chronically. When extrapolated to a full year, we would expect that losing less than an hour-and-a-half of sleep per night could result in clinically meaningful weight gain.”
‘Elevated risk for chronic diseases’
Sedentary time also increased by an average of 17 minutes per day during the six-week period, and by nearly 30 minutes per day for men and postmenopausal women.
“Even when we accounted for the fact that they were awake longer when sleep was shortened, participants spent more time being inactive than when they got adequate sleep,” Zuraikat says.
“This is notable, as people who are more sedentary have an elevated risk for chronic diseases.”
A previous study on the same participants found that women with increased cardiometabolic risk who shortened their sleep by around 80 minutes a night over six weeks had increased insulin resistance, a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
The effects were more pronounced in postmenopausal women.
In another study of the group, researchers found that men and women with elevated heart risk had an influx of inflammatory cells in the heart after losing sleep.
“Though more research is needed to further understand how sleep restriction leads to weight gain, all of our findings suggest that insufficient sleep increases the risk of obesity-related conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease,” St-Onge says.
“Now we need to understand the health effects of improving sleep in those who fail to get adequate sleep on a regular basis.”
The study was published in Annals of Internal Medicine.


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Lifestyle

Health & Wellness

Health

Shortening adequate sleep by 80 minutes a night saw adults’ weight go up one pound in just six weeks in a recent study


Shortening adequate sleep by 80 minutes a night saw adults’ weight go up one pound in just six weeks in a recent study.


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Disease

Columbia University

How chronic sleep loss can cause 0.5kg weight gain every 6 weeks, study finds

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Shortening adequate sleep by 80 minutes a night saw adults’ weight go up one pound in just six weeks in a recent study

Shortening adequate sleep by 80 minutes a night saw adults’ weight go up one pound in just six weeks in a recent study