Sleep to Stay Thin

You may have guessed that, since having the baby, I am obsessed with getting enough sleep.

True, I can no longer tell you what “enough” sleep is. I guess I need 9 or 10 hours and I probably get 6 or 7 every night. The baby waking isn’t so much as issue now. It’s more my own thoughts about tasks left undone that keep me awake.

You may also have guessed that, since having the baby, I am obsessed with my weight.

True, but this is purely because I know I’ve gained, my back actually hurts from the extra load on my belly, and I am not doing what I know I need to do about it. Like, watching what I eat and exercising vigorously four times a week.

A few days ago, I put a ridiculous question to my friends:

If you could go to sleep and wake up weighing exactly what you think you want to weigh, would life be perfect?

And, if the catch was that going to sleep and waking up thin actually meant being in a coma for a year, would you still do it?

Even if no one dyed your hair while you were under and everyone who came to visit would see your roots?

Only one friend, whose child is grown, said that she would do it. The rest of us didn’t want to miss a year of our children’s lives. One wise single friend, however, said that she would not do it because you’d start gaining it back the moment you woke up. It would be a temporary loss, like the stomach-flu diet.

In my defense, I read far too many books by Marian Keyes

And yet, it turns out that sleeping IS good for your weight. According to a study reported in The Scotsman, women who get less than 5 hours sleep a night are more likely to become overweight or obese.

• Professor Sanjay Patel, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who was the lead author of a report presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference yesterday, said: “There have been a number of studies that have shown that at one point in time, people who sleep less weigh more, but this is one of the first to show reduced sleep increases the risk of gaining weight over time.”
• Prof Patel said the researchers had not established a causal link between getting less sleep and putting on weight. “We don’t have an answer from this study about why reduced sleep causes weight gain, but there are some possibilities that deserve further study,” he said. “Sleeping less may effect changes in a person’s basal metabolic rate – the number of calories you burn when you rest.

All the more reason to follow the good old rule of “sleep when the baby sleeps.”