All-Nighters Lower Your Metabolism. So: Chronic Sleep Debt Probably Makes You Fat

You would think that staying in a more wakeful state longer would mean you burn more calories.

And it does.

-But only for awhile.

Then you go downhill.

In an experiment conducted by Ken Wright and the Department of ChronoBiology at UC-Boulder, they found that metabolism was up by about 7% above normal while people were kept up.

BUT: It was down 5% below normal when people were allowed to recover from deprivation, and it stayed down longer.

[NOTE: For God’s sakes, do not try to read the backward-writing & circuitous-jargon in the UC@B link. They use all the wrong terminology.

They should’ve spoken in-terms of Metabolism Up/Down and ~maybe Calories Burned/Unburned.

Malapropianly-positive terms like “saved” are useless and confusing for people who aren’t professional thermodynamicists.

-If you’ve got any extra fat, “saving” calories instead of unsaving them is not a positive thing.

Just stick with the Higher/Lower than average & you’ll get the right takeaways.]

Now, that’s just their [admittedly short] study results. But here are my guesses and the ideas Dr. Ken seems to hint at (to be supplemented in a later post, I’m sure):

1) The participants were only allowed 8 hours sleep on Recovery Day.

That is Not an option any normal person would take. -They’d go for more like 10 or 11 hours.

So: because of that, they’d burn even LESS calories on Recovery Day(s) than they did in the study.

And there is no reason Recovery would be limited to either 1 day or 8 hours total.

2) People in Chronic sleep debt are (probably) in Long-Term Recovery Mode.

And day, after day, after day of having a 5% lower metabolism 16+ hours per day,

but a similar mentality or habits about eating, will just pack on the pounds even more as time drags on.

3) Energy Levels & Activity will be lower. Again, to minimize variation, these studiers had everyone do exactly the same thing: stay still in bed.

-But in normal people, they’re probably going to move around Less than if they were perfectly-rested.

So the normally-added metabolism from an Activity-Factor won’t be there.

–Even Light regular activity will add 20% to your Metabolism.
What would you guess the likely % Calorie hit of doing Less of that or none at all?

and

4) Dr. Wright even says near the end that people eat more after bouts of sleep-dep and cites a few other studies,

That the hormones for BOTH Fullness and Appetite (leptin and ghrelin) go out of wack.

And they do so in favor of Feeling Less Full and Having a Bigger Appetite.

->SO: SUM(chronic recovery 1.days 2.hours, 3.lower metabolism, 4.lower activity, and 5.+6.:Cookie Monster crack-binge levels of 2 different chow-down hormones).=21

-BOOM! You’re fat!