Are you always doing overtime and coming home uber tired? If so, you may want to give your body time to recover, because as it turns out, when you don’t get enough rest, there’s a higher chance of you eating more the following day.
Researchers at King’s College London looked at 11 studies with 172 participants—both male and female with different body types. Each study had a control group of people who got enough sleep (around seven to 12 hours a night) and a group that wasn’t catching enough Z’s (3.5 to 5.5 hours). Participants who didn’t get enough sleep consumed an extra 385 calories on average. If you need a point of comparison, that’s 4.5 slices of bread, which is one-fifth of the caloric intake an active 30-year-old woman needs.
Author Gerda Pot explains, “Sleep-deprived people proportionally consumed more fat and less protein.” She continues, “We need to do more research into sleep as a possible remediable risk factor for obesity and possibly other cardio-metabolic diseases like diabetes, especially in today’s society in which trends are showing that people sleep less.”
Keep this in mind the next time you pull an all-nighter!
This story originally appeared on Cosmo.ph.
*Minor edits have been made by FemaleNetwork.com editors.
