Get A Good Nights Sleep
Right now I am energized and excited because I woke up feeling lighter and yes I have dropped 2 pounds! I started at 179 on Sunday. Now I know that the first few pounds are easy and they will get a lot tougher as I get into it but that’s ok. I need to celebrate my successes as they happen and I’m off to a good start!
It was tempting to stay up last night and figure out how to use the blog features. I was so excited about how easy this was to set up and I am a bit of a computer nerd. There has been some news lately about how lack of sleep can contribute to weight gain. I think it might be true. One of my goals with this blog is to research topics such as this and maybe that will help me to incorporate into my life the good things that I discover in the research. So I did go to sleep at 10:30 last night rather than staying up to write. I found the article from May 25. It was in several places. Here’s a link at Forbes. The intro to the article says:
Getting a decent night’s sleep apparently does more than provide good rest — it seems to curb the number of pounds women put on as they age, according to a new study.
The first question with any health claims is to ask what kind of research did they do. It looks very legitimate. It’s part of the Nurses Health Study which followed 68,000 women for 16 years. They do say that the study did not show a definite cause and effect but there was the link between inadequate sleep and weight gain. They talked about women with 5 hours of sleep on average gaining substantially more weight than those with 7 hours.
OK, I usually get 7 hours or more of sleep at night and yes I have gained weight over the years. So I can’t blame it on lack of sleep but still it’s an interesting piece of data.