Online Health Edge

image: Roca Zhang

Are you hitting roadblocks in your weight loss and you don’t know why? Doing all the hard work and not getting the results?

A recent study in the American Journal of Endocrinology has determined that women who get less than 7 hours of sleep a night are more inclined to gain weight than other.

The Study

In 1986 (Yes this study was a long one) 68,183 women aged 39–65 years participating in the Nurses’ Health Study responded to a question about sleep duration. At the time of response they were free from disease. Originally they were asked to indicate the total hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. They were sent questionnaires every two years. The most recent questionnaire was in 2002, and the journal article was published late last year.

The Results

From the beginning of the study a clear relationship existed between sleep duration and weight gain. Those sleeping 5 hours or less weight 2.47kg more on average than those sleeping 7 hours. Those sleeping 6 hours were 1.24kg heavier. Remember, this is at the start of the study before any follow up had been done. Not only was there this difference at the start, but the study showed women sleeping less were more inclined to put on weight faster.

Over the 16 years of the study, 10.5% of women experienced a 15kg weight gain. Those sleeping 7-8 hours per night had the lowest risk. Women sleeping 6 hours were 12% more likely to have a 15kg weight gain, and those sleeping 5 hours or less were 32% more likely. It should be noted that calorie intake and activity levels were taken into account in this study and did not affect the percentages.

Why Does Sleep Deprivation Cause Weight Gain?

There are several reasons why a lack of sleep can lead to you gaining unnecessary pounds.

• Hypothalamic- pituitary functions (a place where your hormones originate from) are strongly linked to circadian rhythms and sleep regulatory processes. These include hormones that influence eating, energy balance and metabolism. So basically a lack of sleep can mess around with some pretty important hormones for maintaining weight.
• Short term sleep restriction lowers your level of the satiety producing hormone, leptin, which basically makes you feel full. A double whammy to that is that sleep restriction increases levels of the appetite producing hormone, ghrelin. Which makes you basically want to eat more.
• A side effect of lack of sleep is fatigue. If you are tired you are less inclined to exercise and may reduce physical activity and energy expenditure. Therefore predisposing you to weight gain.
• It has been suggested lack of sleep can affect your metabolic rate, but further research is needed to confirm this.

So… hit the sack and help your cause, and ask yourself, Are You Sleeping Enough?

OK so it’s a little off topic but I couldn’t resist. I stumbled across this when I was signing out of my hotmail account on ninemsn. Britney is a celebrity who is well known to have body image issues, and in the last few years we have watched her fluctuate up and down, along with the turbulence in her life. In her latest video, Piece of Me, there have been reports that she was ‘digitally slimmed-down’. She appears a lot skinnier in the video than she did in paparazzi reports earlier in the month. It would be nice if weight loss were that easy eh. Read the full article here.

pic: Gatorade.ca

Gatorade and other Sports Drinks are pretty popular these days. Its not uncommon to see people at the gym guzzling the stuff down. I’m going to pose a question to you sports drink drinkers…

Do You Really Need It?

Are you wanting to lose weight? Run as faster 10km? Gain some muscle? Firstly, let me make it clear that as an athlete, Sports Drinks are an essential part of my games and trainings, I definitely need them. They replace what I lose in electrolytes and really do help my body uptake fluid more efficiently. However, the average person needs to think twice before fueling up during their workout. You need to ask yourself if a Sports Drink will help you reach where you want to be.

The most common goal I hear when working with people is weight loss. The way to lose weight is to push the energy balance into negative. Energy out is greater than energy in. Now, for the average gym goer who does cardio a few times a week and lifts a bit, Gatorade is simply not helping your energy balance. Water should be enough to replace your fluid losses. It should be noted that Gatorade and Sports Drinks are specially formulated to give athletes a boost of blood sugar, some ready made energy, and a means by which to rehydrate much faster and hence, perform better. But if you ask most people who have set weight loss as their goal, they don’t really care about their performance. Remember: different goals call for different strategies.

Have a look at the following food label:

Pic from dietfacts.com

If you consume one bottle of Gatorade you are pumping in 125 calories. No it’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but if all your are doing is going for a light jog on the treadmill, you will be lucky to burn that off, and the fluid you lose from this type of training can easily be replaced with water.

Conclusion

Assess where you are at (Yes I know, boring answer and not very definitive, but that is basically the fitness industry…individuality). If you are in training for a fun run you want to do and are training frequently, then a Sports Drink would be a perfect way to supplement your training, getting fluids back faster and more efficiently, speeding your recovery and hopefully allowing you to train harder and enhance your performance.

If your sole goal is weight loss, then I wouldn’t recommend drinking a sports drink. It’s calories that you simply don’t need. Water will do fine for most situations regarding weight loss. However, if you find you are training extremely hard, and are often fatigued and aren’t bouncing back from your training, then a sports drink could be for you, and will probably help you in your quest. As I mentioned above, different goals call for different strategies. You need to be informed. If your goal is weight loss, it may be working against you.

Welcome to Online Health Edge. Check out my Introduction page to get a longer spiel on why I started this blog. I want to get some good quality fitness information out on the web. There is a lot of available info and quite frankly, a lot of it is simply not correct. I hope you enjoy this site.

So is a sauna good for you? The pros are they are so relaxing and you leave feeling great. So the water loss in a sauna is a bit of an issue? But if you hydrate then you can negate that pretty quickly. Saunas are great for your health. You just simply feel so relaxed afterwards. A lt of people question the benefits of saunas for your health but we know better. The Europeans have it right, get on the saunas and relax. A stress free and relaxed like is a long and good one.