It's the Sleep Diet. You change none of your eating habits, none of your exercise regimens (or lack thereof), and really nothing in your life except for the number of hours you sleep (and I assume this means getting non-stressful, non-wakeful sleep). The rule is to sleep a full eight hours a night (and a little more if your body needs it), EVERY night. That's it. You can still eat your ramen, pudding, desserts, bacon grease, but you must consistently sleep, and sleep around the same hour every night (the goal is consistency).
A woman in Japan tried this. At the start of the study, she was around 265 pounds. She always ate a HUGE breakfast, drank tons of pop (soda, for all you non-Midwesterners), ate lots of ramen and the spread was comprehensive! I have attached at the bottom the video, and even if you don't understand Japanese or Chinese subtitles, you will still get the gist of what is going on from the footage.
One thing to note is that before the study, she typically did not sleep 8 hours. She spent so many hours eating and her body digesting that she probably slept on average 4-6 hours, which is what happened in the first few days of the study. After 4-5 days, she started to adjust and sleep her eight hours. After the first week/week and a half, no progress, change or weight loss...(keep reading...)
But, one phenomenon that started was that she gradually had trouble finishing all the food she used to consume (she used to polish off the plate). She couldn't even get to the two packs of Ramen that she used to top off at lunch time. Another development, towards the end of the second week, her skin started to clear up. She is a regular patron at a certain restaurant, and the restaurant owner told her, your skin! It looks so good, it has gotten so clear! Wow.
By the end of the second week, she stepped on the scale and couldn't believe her eyes, with no change except for sleep, she shed a few pounds! Any less consumption of food she started this week was not forced on her, it was purely her body reacting with less cravings.
After a little more time in the study, she lost 11 pounds! Lost 11 pounds from just sleeping more!! When sleeping enough, it seems that the hormonal balance is more in check and our body (or brain) ends up craving less, therefore consuming less rather than thinking that the body is starved and needs to eat. I think this would explain my situation when I used to work around the clock, perhaps at first losing some weight, but over a long period of time, my body was going through major cravings for all food, especially unhealthy. The result of satiating those cravings was putting on weight.
The doctor on the show said that many of his patients lose somewhere from 5.5-6.5 pounds from just sleeping more (i.e. eight hours). Granted this woman's weight loss results are more than average, it is still amazing just how sleep can change our bodies!
Pressures from work, family, activities, etc. may be causing us to sleep less or get lower quality sleep, resulting in the hormonal imbalance as mentioned, producing more cravings, and putting on more weight. I think a very interesting theory, and seems to make some sense.
The video below!
4 comments:
heheh my goal is eight hours!! also, an interesting study you might be interested in where they followed 1300 individuals and looked at factors in the ones that became obese. " For each hour of sleep people typically got each day, the odds of their becoming obese declined by 30% -- even with other factors like physical activity level and TV watching taken into account." (obviously, not necessarily causal relationship but still interesting!)
oh totally cool! Yeah, I think a sleep diet might really make a difference for some people...
Pretty interesting - that's quite dramatic, even if her results are atypical.
Hi Dawn! Agreed, I was pretty surprised too.
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