What’s the connection with sleep and weight loss?
Sleep is good.
And it is important. Very important! It plays a huge part in your ability to recover from a workout. Nutrition is also a huge part in your ability to recover form a workout.
But where nutrition has the ability to change and shape your body like nothing else, it also has the ability to ruin you. Likewise, so does sleep. Well, not enough of it to be exact. 
What is sleep exactly? You do it everyday, and so does everybody else. It is very important and very necessary for human function, otherwise we would be up 24/7. But we’re not. 
Some people need more to function at optimal levels, some need less.
But what is the optimal level? I’m sure you’ve heard numbers thrown around. 8 hours is best! You need 7-9 hours. Some say at least 6.
Nobody can give you a definitive answer, because everybody is different. Some people function on less then 6 hours. But are you functioning optimally? 
The body acts differently depending on the stimulus that is put on it. More stress will cause you and your body to need more sleep, but you probably won’t get it cause of all the stress on you.
But what about lack of sleep and weight loss? Is there a connection? Well, it was pretty easy to find. They do studies on pretty much anything and everything nowadays. Some studies are obviously worthless and you wonder why they even did some. But sleep and weight loss are pretty important topics separately. But is there a connection between the two?
One of the studies was done by the University of British Columbia, and it showed significantly more people are likely to be overweight if they get less then 7 hours of sleep a night.
The likely culprits for this are two hormones called leptin and ghrelin. I’ve written about leptin before and it’s affects on weight loss. Leptin is an appetite depressant, it basically tells you when you’ve had enough, and a lack of sleep decreases this hormone in your body. Ghrelin is an appetite stimulator, and it gets increased with a lack of sleep.
So if you are sleep deprived, basically you have less of a hormone that is supposed to tell you ‘you’ve had enough’ and more of a hormone that is supposed to tell you ‘give me more’. Not a good combo.
And the average number of hours per night of sleep that the average American is getting now compared to about 40 years ago is about 2 hours less.
So the point is getting your sleep! Not just for muscle recovery from a hard workout, but also to keep those nasty little hormones in c
heck. No wonder it’s referred to ‘beauty sleep’.
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