The Fat Diaries: Can You Sleep Your Way to Skinny?

It’s been pounded into our heads since we were old enough to whine, “but I’m not tired, Mom,” that sleep's important. But now, it's harder to get than ever.

So how was your weekend? A doozy right? A royal wedding and the bad guy dies. Sounds like a Shakespeare play (or maybe a Disney movie). But if you’re like my house, you stayed up late or got up early to watch both... which meant you got approximately 18 hours of sleep from Friday to Monday (bleech). Why can’t news happen at a decent hour?

I think most of America was haggard, pale and unwashed on Monday morning which probably meant we were ALL craving massive amounts of carbohydrates. I actually broke down at the gas station (weeping, sobbing, etc.) before I marched into McDonalds and bought a small #1 combo meal with a coffee frappe.

It’s been pounded into our head since we were old enough to whine, “but I’m not TIRED, Mom!”  that sleep is important. The amount of sleep we get affects how well ALL of our systems run including our immune system, our digestion, our sex drives and even our sanity. It also affects our weight. Lack of sleep throws our hormones out of whack, especially hormones that tell us when we’re hungry and when we’re full. Ghrelin levels rise which tell us we’re starving and need food now, and leptin levels dip so we don’t know when we’re full. Our body is also slower to process the food and instead of flushing out fat cells, it stores them. Which means that extra hour on Twitter or playing World of Warcraft is making us fatter.

More than one dietician has argued that one reason why America is so fat is because we don’t sleep enough. We’re a distracted culture, trying to fit so much into our lives. We have multiple demands on our attention: there’s our personal life, our work life, our family life, our social networking life.  That’s a LOT to cram into 24 hours while leaving enough room for 7 hours of sleep and 15 minutes of “Nobody talk to me for &#$@ sake!” alone time. On top of that, when we’re cranky and tired from our fitful five hours of sleep, what do we use instead? Caffeine!

We down energy drinks (most loaded with sugar) we slug back GALLONS of coffee and tea and soda (more sugar) to stimulate our brains just enough so that we may drive to work without running over people and operate a computer at limited risk to the internet. But if you’re like me, the coffee doesn’t really kick in until about noon followed by a huge dip in the afternoon. We’re all familiar with the 3pm slump, and what do we do to get through it? MORE CAFFEINE!  By the time it’s 8pm our heart rate is soaring, we’re wide awake and ready to start the day! Too bad bedtime is in three hours. Then we toss and turn until 2am and it starts all over again the next morning.

This leaves most of America tired, cranky, and opinionated (oops, that last one is just me). It’s all just another cog in the machine generating a Fat America.

So, what do we do about it? This is another “heck if I know” situation, because after 30 years I still can’t manage to get to bed on time! I’ve never been a morning person and from early childhood, all of my memories from 6-to-11 am involved being dragged out of a warm bed to stare unseeing at a blackboard. It was worse when I hit puberty, because my sleep clock was telling me that I wasn’t tired until 1am and that I should sleep until noon every day. Now that I’m a mom, I’ve been cursed with two kids that think the morning is when the sun comes up and not when mommy feels like rolling out of bed.

This year, my birthday present was that I was allowed to sleep in until 10.

Here’s hoping for Mother’s Day.

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