Sleep to lose weight

There is no universal recipe for losing weight, but adequate exercise and a healthy diet are the key ingredients. However, there is another important factor that determines how fast you lose weight - your sleep.

What happens in your sleep?

Getting enough sleep is often overlooked when it comes to keeping a pound off the scale. Yet it has a big impact on your weight. For one, sleep helps balance your hormones such as ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and leptin, the hormone that regulates your satiety. If you don't sleep enough, your ghrelin or hunger levels increase and leptin decreases, messing up your sense of satiety.

"During your sleep, many hormones, including growth hormone, are produced," explains sleep expert Rizwana Sultana. The secretion of growth hormone is not only important for growth and repair of tissues and cells, but also allows the body to burn energy from fat reserves.

So how much sleep do you need?

But exactly how much sleep do you need to lose weight? According to Dr. Sultana, you should spend 7 to 9 hours each night in dreamland if you are trying to lose weight. "If you sleep less, your hormones become unbalanced, making you give in to that delicious greasy pizza or bar of chocolate much faster than if you do start your day rested." In fact, research shows that you eat an average of 385 more calories the day after you get too little sleep. Moreover, the motivation to exercise is often far from there when you are not rested.

Extra boost?

Want to give your metabolism an extra boost? Then turn the heating down a tad. In fact, research shows that sleeping in a room where the temperature is between 15.5°C and 19.4°C causes you to burn a whopping 7% more calories than in a warmer bedroom. Converted, that means you burn an extra 100 calories after three nights. In itself, that doesn't seem like much, but on a yearly basis, that adds up to more than 12,000 extra calories burned. Plus, it's good for your wallet. Win-win!