Sleep is the key to healthy eating

WE’VE known for some time that not getting enough sleep can make you fat — largely because it affects your hunger hormones and makes you crave more sugary things.

I once took part in an experiment, where a group of us were asked to cut back on sleep for one night: the next day we ate on average 300 calories more than normal. Now a new study has shown that not only do you put on weight, but it goes on in the worst place — around the gut, in the form of visceral fat. This infiltrates organs such as your liver and pancreas, and can lead to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. For the study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology last month, 12 healthy adults were asked to sleep as normal or were restricted to four hours a night. They were allowed to eat whatever they wanted. The volunteers came back later and repeated the experiment, but this time the groups switched over. The volunteers consumed roughly 300 extra calories a day when they were sleep restricted. But while they only put on a pound in weight, scans revealed that they’d piled on visceral fat, up by a whopping 11 per cent. As an insomniac, the best tip I know is if you wake in the night and don’t go back to sleep within 15 minutes, get up, find something boring to do and don’t go back to bed until you feel sleepy.