Not Too Much & Not Too Little

After you eat Thanksgiving dinner, you may find yourself getting sleepy, because turkey contains a natural sleep-inducing amino acid called tryptophan. This is GOOD because cutting back on sleep reduces the benefits of dieting BUT sleeping too much may cause you to die younger. When dieters in a new study got a full night’s sleep, they lost the same amount of weight as when they slept less. When dieters got adequate sleep, however, more than half of the weight they lost was fat. When they cut back on their sleep, only one-fourth of their weight loss came from fat. They also felt hungrier. When sleep was restricted, dieters produced higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and reduces energy expenditure. Researcher Plamen Penev says, "If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels. Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55%."

Another new study suggests that the secret to a long life may come with just enough sleep. Less than 5 hours a night is probably not enough, but 8 hours is probably too much. Moderation in everything, that’s OUR motto too. Unlike some other websites we know, we don’t try to scare you (although sometimes the truth IS scary), but we do try to inform you (and we put a legitimate link at the end of every story so you KNOW our news is "real.") If you like what we do, the only way to make sure we’ll still be here tomorrow is to subscribe today!