Sticking to an exercise and meal plan can be difficult. But new research suggests a way to make it easier: getting a good night's sleep on a regular basis.
The findings, presented Friday at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle, and Cardiometabolic Health meeting in Boston, found that people with good sleep habits were less likely to lose weight when trying to lose weight than those with poor sleep health. Also better able to follow exercise and diet plans. The research is considered preliminary until the full findings are published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“Focusing on getting a good night's sleep—seven to nine hours at night, a regular wake-up time, and waking up refreshed and alert throughout the day—can be an important behavior that helps people stick to Their physical activity and dietary adjustment goals,” lead study author Christopher E. Kline said in a news release. Klein is an associate professor in the Department of Health and Human Development at the University of Pittsburgh.
Kline and his colleagues investigated whether good sleep health is related to the degree to which people follow lifestyle changes during a 12-month weight loss program. They measured the sleep habits of 125 adults who were overweight or obese but had no medical conditions that required medical supervision of their diet or physical activity. Participants had an average age of 50 and were predominantly white and female.
The researchers measured sleep habits using questionnaires, sleep diaries, and readings from a wrist-worn device that recorded sleep, waking activity, and rest over seven days. Six sleep indicators were scored as good or poor using a composite scale of sleep regularity, satisfaction, alertness, timing, percentage of time spent asleep in bed, and hours slept.
Sleep measurements were taken at the start of the study and again at 6 and 12 months. During these times, adherence to the weight loss program was also measured by recording the percentage of group intervention sessions attended, the percentage of days on which participants consumed 85%-115% of their recommended daily calories, and changes in the duration of daily moderate or vigorous physical activity sex.
The analysis showed that better sleep health was associated with higher group meeting attendance, greater adherence to caloric intake goals, and greater improvements in time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity.
“We had hypothesized that sleep would be related to lifestyle changes; however, we did not expect an association between sleep health and all three measures of our lifestyle changes,” Klein said. “While we did not intervene in sleep health in this study, these results suggest that optimizing sleep may lead to better adherence to lifestyle changes.”
He recommends future studies examining whether improving sleep health can increase adherence to lifestyle changes — and ultimately, weight loss.
Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said the new study shows sleep has nothing to do with body weight. “It's about what we're doing to help manage our own weight,” he said.
“This may be because sleep affects factors that lead to hunger and appetite, metabolism and the ability to regulate metabolism, and the ability to make healthy choices in general,” said Grandner, who co-authored the American Heart Association's presidential advisory, Added the duration of sleep to its list of key measures of good cardiovascular health, known as Life's Essential 8. He was not involved in the new study.
“Studies like this really show that all these things are connected,” he said, “and that sometimes sleep is something we can start to control, and it can help open the door to other pathways to health.”
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