While a few studies have noted there’s a link between sleep deprivation and weight gain, alongside other wellbeing concerns, you’d hardly be expected to thing that all you need to look like Kate Moss is a good night’s sleep. However, a buzzed-about new diet, “The Overnight Diet,” claims to help you lose two pounds as you sleep during the first day of the diet.
In a sense, maintaining a healthy sleep schedule does help support a healthy diet because, as it has been proven, a deficit of sleep can lead to increased feelings of hunger and overeating as a result. But does it really work the other way around? Sleep wellness expert Michael Breus, PhD, says, ‘It’s not so much that if you sleep, you will lose weight, but if you are sleep-deprived, meaning that you are not getting enough minutes of sleep or good quality sleep, your metabolism will not function properly.’
But maybe adding a diet aspect to this research could shift the balance. For the weight loss programme, you undertake a fast once a week in which you consume only homemade, protein-rich smoothies. Then you follow this with six days of a low-calorie, protein rich diet. According to the diet’s creator, Caroline Apovian, MD, the director of nutrition and weight management at Boston Medical Centre, ‘That first night, you go to sleep, you sleep your eight hours, you are down two pounds. If you continue to get enough sleep every night, you won’t get those hunger pangs. The hunger pangs come from lack of sleep, which induces the hunger hormone to get secreted from your gut.’
However, this promised two pounds will be water, and not fat. It’s true that water weight loss is an important step toward total weight loss – but it does make the “overnight” promise seem a bit less significant. David L. Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP and director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Centre, commented, ‘I keep waiting for us to get tired of going after the new fad diet. But our appetite for these things is insatiable in the culture. The reason this can work in the short term is that it imposes rules. If you go from undisciplined eating, to any diet no matter what the rules are, chances are you’ll lose some weight. But it’s not a realistic way to live.’