Sleep: The Latest Way to Lose Fat

There will be no big marketing budget behind this diet breakthrough, no FDA approvals, no celebrity endorsements: Research published this month in the Annals Internal of Medicine (one of the the big kahunas of peer reviewed medical journals) establishes that sleep--and sleep alone--is one of the most powerful diet tools ever identified. 

There's not a diet pill on the planet that could accomplish what sleep did in this study, which compared two groups of overweight non-smokers on calorie restricted diets for 14 days. One group clocked 8.5 hours of sleep per night, and the other logged 5.5 hours of sleep per night (which the authors point out is a "norm" for people in this day and age.) Both groups ate roughly 1,450 calories a day. After two weeks, the people who slept more lost more fat than the group who slept less. More than half of the weight loss during the 8.5 hours of sleep versus only one quarter of the weight loss during the 5.5 hours of sleep was fat. People literally burned fat while they slept.

Read Dr. Merrell's blog on the study.