Weight loss: If you want your diet and exercise to work, get enough sleep

They say that losing weight is 80 percent of what you eat and 20 percent exercising. And, experts agree. No matter how much you exercise, if you do not watch what you put in your mouth, there will be no shedding of pounds happening.

However, there is one other thing that you should also be taking into account, and that is your sleeping pattern. The amount of sleep that you get is just as important as what you eat and your exercise.

Libby Limon, a nutritionist, told the Daily Express that your lack of sleep could be dictating your food cravings. This, because it is affecting three of your hormones—cortisol, ghrelin and leptin. All three have an impact on your weight, so disrupting the three may not be a good idea.

So, how does this work? Sleep deprivation could lead to increasing levels of cortisol in the bloodstream and this could lead to weight gain.

According to a research, weight gain is seen among people who sleep for less than seven hours a night.

Ghrelin, on the other hand, is your hunger hormone while leptin is your satiation hormone.

When you lack sleep, it increases your ghrelin and decreases your leptin. Thus, increased ghrelin pushes you to crave food and because your leptin is reduced, it may take a while for you to be full. And, this translates to an increase in calorie intake.

So, aside from driving your cravings and increasing your calorie intake, poor sleep could also affect your resting metabolic rate (RMR). Your RMR is the number of calories that your body burns when you are at rest.

This is why if you don’t want your effort on dieting and exercising to go to naught, then better get the right amount of sleep. While sleeping patterns vary from one person to another, a healthy adult will need between seven to nine hours of sleep to function properly, while the young ones more.