Sleep vs.Obesity

I read a very interesting and insightful article the other night with regard to how our sleep, or lack thereof, can affect obesity and diabetes.  A recent study by the Annals of Internal Medicine (Stop snickering.  There are two Ns in Annals.) looked into just how sleep deprivation can influence our disposition to weight gain.  What the research found was that too little sleep interferes with how our bodies respond to insulin, a hormone that regulates appetite and metabolism.

The study took healthy men and women and limited their sleep to 4.5 hours per night over 4 days.  The experiment found that fat cells were 30% less sensitive to insulin as a result.  These facts lead me to reexamine how my obesity and sleep apnea were so intertwined.  It wasn't as simple as I previously thought.

After over 200 posts, I honestly can't recall how much I have documented the gruesome details of my battle with sleep apnea.  There was a point in my life when I was so sleep deprived that I was often delusional and a danger to myself and others.  I attributed that condition to my obesity and those conclusions were only reinforced by my absence of symptoms with great weight loss.  What I apparently missed was another vital piece of the equation as to how my apnea fed my obesity, not just the other way around.

During the years where my sleep issues were at their worst, my weight skyrocketed exponentially.  I always assumed that external influences such as my father's illness for one, led to overeating.  I have no doubt that my environment was one of many causes of my food addiction, but with this new information, I can see that the rapid move from mid 300s to high 400s over turn of the century was fueled, in part, by a vicious cycle in which one condition fed the other, thereby causing me to feed myself.

Another conclusion from the study was the increased potential for diabetes from sleep deprivation.  Fortunately for me, I dodged that bullet in those dark days.

If you, or someone you know, has issues with snoring excessively or halted breathing during their sleep, please get a sleep study.  Treatment can possibly save a life and be an effective tool in losing weight.  The findings from my studies positively impacted my life in more ways than I can count.  These days, my CPAP machine still helps my wife and I fall asleep, but not in the way it was intended.  I no longer wear it to help me breathe.  My weight loss has made that a non-issue.  It provides some white-noise in which The Wife and I have gotten so accustomed to over the years.  Its familiar "shooshing" sound ferries us off to dreamland nightly.  

Cya Sunday,
M

What I ate Friday and how I exercised:
Breakfast ~ one egg on whole grain toast
Lunch ~ whole grain pasta w/marinara sauce
Dinner ~ a kitchen sink salad w/tuna, beans, pignoli, onion and homemade balsamic vinaigrette
Exercise ~ none