Your Diet Sucks Because You’re Not Sleeping Enough

There’s a reason your body begs for a donut after you only got a few hours of sleep—and it’s not because you’re weak or lack willpower. It’s because one sleepless night scrambles your hunger signals, floods your system with stress hormones, and only a high-calorie meal can recoup some of the energy that should have been generated in the form of a good night’s sleep.

In an essay published in The Conversation, Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, an associate professor of neurology from the University of Pittsburgh, says that sleep is when your body balances the hormones ghrelin and leptin. They control your hunger and fullness cues.

Miss out on rest, and ghrelin goes up while leptin plummets. That means you’re hungrier and way less satisfied after eating. Your stress hormone cortisol also jumps in, nudging you to do whatever it takes to store fat.

If that weren’t bad enough, the decision-making center of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, starts running on low power mode just as the craving portion of your brain, the nucleus accumbens, wakes up, ready to eat. This combo turns you into a filthy snack goblin raiding your fridge and pantry in your underwear.

In lab studies, people who slept only four to five hours not only wanted more junk food but rated it as more desirable, regardless of whether or not they were actually hungry.

Your Brain Is Tricking You Into Eating Like Crap Because You Slept Like Crap

After one bad night, insulin sensitivity drops by up to 25 percent, meaning your body struggles to process sugar efficiently. Instead of turning a donut into fuel, it stores it as fat, particularly around your belly. At this point, you’re just openly inviting type II diabetes into your life.

The point is, sleep is not optional. It’s not something that should be sacrificed and replaced with a little bit of sleep procrastination.

Sleep is integral to biological maintenance. Regular sleep resets appetite, improves blood sugar control, and recalibrates your brain’s reward system so that you don’t constantly feel like you need a reward just for having slogged through another hour of waking life. Rewards will actually feel rewarding and satisfying because, after having caught some choice Zs, your brain will start to seek rewards more sparingly.

Luckily, you don’t need a week in a sensory deprivation tank to bounce back. A couple of decent nights can start reversing the damage, says Fong-Isariyawongse. So next time you’re sleep-deprived and reaching for a third energy drink and a microwavable breakfast burrito, don’t shame yourself. J

ust know your body is struggling right now, and there is a solution. Shut off the screens you’ve been staring at for hours and just get to sleep already. In no time at all, you’ll find you don’t want that donut as much as you used to.