Sleep and positivity are essential when losing weight. Even if you exercise and eat right, stress and lack of sleep keep you from losing weight.
Stress affects not only mood and sleep, but also body weight, warn scientists at the Center for Health Research in Portland, USA. Experts have studied the link between stress, lack of sleep and difficulty losing weight.
The experiment involved 472 people over 30 years old with a body mass index between 30 and 50. 83 percent of the participants were women, a quarter of all participants were volunteers over 65 years old.
The volunteers participated in a weight loss program that includes weekly group sessions, keeping a food diary, at least three hours of exercise per week, reducing daily calories by 500 kcal, and switching to a diet low in fat and salt, and high in fruits. vegetables and proteins.
Six months later, the researchers compared the participants’ results based on their stress levels, quality of night sleep, and levels of depression.
60 percent of the volunteers during the study lost at least 5 kg, on average, each of them lost almost 6 kg. However, scientists found that in addition to exercise, keeping a food diary and group activities, sleep quality and stress levels also affected weight loss.
It turned out that participants in the experiment who slept less than 6 hours a day or more than 7 hours, but experienced stress, lost less weight than those who slept for 6 to 8 hours.
The researchers also noticed that weight loss was more successful among those who normalized sleep and reduced stress during the study. Experts recommend that those wishing to lose weight pay attention not only to diet and energy consumption, but also to sleep quality and stress level.
These findings support other studies showing how sleep deprivation and unbalanced daily routines lead to obesity in children, adolescents and adults alike. In adolescence, this is especially true for girls.