Are your sleep habits making you fat, nasty and dumb?

Just to add my own story to the article.

I've always been a heavier guy, even with exercise and proper dieting. A couple years back I had issues with extremely high blood pressure spikes. It landed me in the hospital for a few days.

After my wife watched a medical show on Discovery Channel she came to me one day and says "Maybe you should get checked for sleep apnea?"

At that time on most weekends I could sleep for 13 hours straight and wake up still feeling exhausted.

Went and had a sleep study done and the results showed that I woke up over 150 times throughout the night and never entered REM sleep. With a CPAP machine I awoke only once.

The CPAP has change my life. Because I have more quality sleep I have more energy for exercising and have dropped another 20 lbs because of it. I work out 4-5 times a week. My quality of life has improved ten-fold.

So if you're a larger person that feels like the energy is drained from you, has problems getting the motivation to follow through on a physical fitness plan, and _especially_ if you're a loud snorer, you should get a sleep study done.

While wearing a CPAP to bed isn't going to get you laid, you'll quickly realize how much life you've been missing out on because of your poor sleep.

It's an interesting article with some excellent information. However, I don't like the implication that your eating or exercising habits don't matter or aren't significant.

I find it annoying that often people highlight one aspect of a healthly lifestyle by attempting to claim the highlighting of another aspect is overblown.

You know, I'd agree that sleep deprivation leads to all sorts of horrible things, but saying lack of sleep has caused American obesity is like saying the relentless decline in the number of Pirates has led to global warming. Correlation != Causation.

As the canonical example, Spaniards sleep on average 40 minutes less than other Europeans, with all sorts of detrimental effects (highest incidence of workplace accidents), but they are a fairly thin population.

Everyone is looking for a quick fix to getting fat. There isn't one. Eat less food and more healthy food, and do something that requires physical exertion.

It could be correlation rather than causation (except for extreme case like the sleep apnea of aantix).