Is Your Bedtime the Missing Piece in Your Weight Loss Journey?

New Delhi: An earlier bedtime could be associated with weight loss among prediabetics, suggesting that sleep timing may be a promising new target for shedding kilos, a study has found.

Nearly 200 adults with prediabetes, who slept less than 6.5 hours a night, were randomly assigned to take part in either an eight-week lifestyle program or the lifes6tyle program with an added sleep component.

The study, published in the journal Nursing Research, found that adding sleep coaching to a diabetes prevention lifestyle program helped participants sleep better and feel less sleepy during the day.

While blood sugar levels of the participants did not change, the results point to sleep timing as a promising new target for weight loss, researchers said.

“When we fall asleep — not just how much we sleep — seems to be an important and overlooked factor for weight loss and metabolic health,” lead author Susan Kohl Malone, assistant professor at New York University’s College of Nursing, said.

Poor sleep, in which one gets under seven hours of sleep, goes to bed late or has irregular sleep patterns, has been connected to weight gain and poor glucose control in previous studies.

Sleeping too little can raise levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, which promote insulin resistance and can shift appetite hormones in ways that increase hunger and food intake. Similarly, going to sleep late can lead to late-night eating, when insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance are at their lowest point.

“In contrast, falling asleep earlier may limit late-night eating and better align food intake with the body’s optimal metabolic window,” said Malone.

Over weekly video calls, the participants learnt about healthy eating, physical activity, and stress management for diabetes prevention. Those in the lifestyle-plus-sleep group received sleep-focused sessions, including sleep hygiene, retraining the brain to see the bed as a cue for sleep, and a plan to incrementally shift their bedtime earlier to increase their total sleep time.

All participants completed daily sleep diaries. Before and after the program, they wore both continuous glucose monitors to measure glucose levels and research-grade wrist monitors (actigraphs) to track sleep.

The researchers observed that while neither program changed glucose levels, both groups saw improvements in sleep and weight loss. The lifestyle-plus-sleep group had greater improvements in self-reported sleep quality and daytime sleepiness compared to the lifestyle group, and its participants’ sleep timing shifted significantly earlier.

The authors found that an “earlier sleep onset, regardless of group assignment, was independently associated with greater weight loss, whereas changes in sleep duration were not.”

Each hour earlier that participants fell asleep was associated with about 1.3 pounds (0.73 kilograms) of weight loss over the eight weeks, they said.

In addition to curbing late-night eating, the team proposed several mechanisms by which falling asleep earlier could help with weight loss.

Staying up late is linked to more exposure to artificial light, increased activity in the sympathetic nervous system (which controls the body’s “fight or flight” response), and increased appetite driven by the “hunger hormone” ghrelin, they said.

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