What Causes Fat Gain? What?
Not Enough Sleep; Eat & Sleep
Skip Breakfast; Lots Of Alcohol?

You Bet

Let's tackle first the relationship between fat gain and sleep deprivation.

You probably have read or heard it somewhere that lack of sleep can make you fat?

Oh! Not very nice here......

Because you've been depriving yourself of sleep due to working overtime; taking care of your baby; out partying; burning the midnight oil (cos' school exam's round the corner)......

Don't panic.

Let's see if there's a cause and effect relationship between sleeping less and gaining weight.

Granted, if sleep deprivation does “cause” fat gain, then you would always gain weight if you sleep less, even if your food intake stay unchanged.

However, let's say you sleep less and also eat less. What happens? You lose weight.

If you're awake more hours and you're more active during those increased waking hours, again, I say, you'll lose weight.

So how does it really work? Why do you tend to gain weight when you're sleep deprived?

Studies suggest that the likely explanation for it is this - an imbalance or disruption in your hormones which can affect your appetite and food intake is at work, so you're more likely to eat more when you're sleep deprived.

Researchers seem to think that sleep deprivation can reduce leptin (the anti starvation hormone, also known as an anorexigenic hormone) and increase ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger.

If you sleep less, you've more awake time which in turn makes you need more energy. You satisfy this greater energy need by increasing the appetite stimulating hormones and ghrelin is one such hormone.

In addition, when hormones are imbalanced, that can affect nutrient partitioning.

So, when you mess up partitioning hormones, it’s quite possible that you're more likely to have fat gain when having a surplus (not muscle) and lose muscle (not fat) when having a deficit.

(P/S: Nutrient partitioning refers to where the energy comes from when you've a calorie deficit - fat or lean tissue - and where the energy goes when you've a calorie surplus - fat or lean tissue)

I'm listing 3 common ones that I think you can almost resonate to. Things you do everyday but you've no inkling that they're the ones that cause you to gain weight......

1. Eat, then sleep

When you sleep, your metabolism slows down. Hence, your body stores, rather than metabolizes, the food (or calories) you eat right before you sleep, as fat.

Simple.

2. Skip breakfast - a real killer fat gain "exercise"!

This is because when you sleep, you would have had that "window of time period" between say 11 pm at night to 7 am the next morning, when you don't eat food.

Couple this with a metabolism that's already slowed down when you sleep.....

Just imagine if you skip breakfast, your body would take the cue that you're now really facing "starvation", so it slows down your metabolism even further to conserve energy and food you've eaten, to help you face "starvation"......

Oh, ah! You can't burn off calories; you store them as fat.

So, always, always eat breakfast, to kick start your metabolism for the day! Even if it's just a small bite of something - fruit, bread.......

3. Drink alcohol frequently

Calories in alcohol are high - 1 gram of it contains 7 calories, only second to fat which has 9 calories in a gram.

If you drink a couples of glasses a day or night and frequently, the calories pile up. You may think nothing about the calories because they're all liquids but they can really be your fat gain culprits.

What makes it worse is that you normally drink alcohol later in the day or in the evening, a time when your body has the least need for the extra calories.

And alcohol inhibits both your fat-burning enzymes and muscle-building hormones for several hours after consumption.

You got to be careful when you drown the glasses. Easy and moderate drinking do you more good, in the case of alcohol.

You do see how easy to have fat gain, doing these 3 things which I'm sure, are what we've already built-in, to do, thinking nothing of them.

Hey! Change them.

Then see weight loss!

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