Common sense would indicate that the formula for weight control is very simple: Don't eat more calories than you expend and your weight should remain the same. Eat less calories you loose weight, eat more calories and you gain weight. Many people make sure that they burn up extra calories by going to the gym or engage in sports activities.

Michael Thorpy, M.D, the director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York, offers a wonderful alternative activity that may just be the ticket for loosing some unwanted pounds: Sleeping!

That is correct! Some sleep researchers claim that getting the proper amount of decent sleep will aid the effort to lighten the load on wary skeletons.

The Lancet, one of the oldest peer-reviewed medical journals, published a study done by the University of Chicago in 1999 which associated sleep disturbances such as restricted sleep to about four hours over a period of six nights with negatively affected carbohydrate metabolism and endocrine functions.

Metabolism is the term used to describe the efficiency of how foods are being processed within the body, and endocrine functions are involved with the regulation of metabolic processes.

The Journal of the American Medical Association also got into the act of researching the affects of sleep on hormonal functioning. They found that age related sleep changes were associated with hormonal alterations. The endocrine system involves the structures that regulate the production of hormones. This study correlated their findings with The Lancet research and found that disturbed sleep patterns indeed influence the hormonal functions negatively.

The human body is to a great degree regulated by circadian rhythms. Dr. Joyce Walsleben is the director of the Sleep Disorder Center at the New York School of Medicine and the author of A Woman's Guide to Sleep: Guaranteed Solutions for a Good Night's Rest. She writes: "When you disrupt sleep, you disturb your hormones, you become glucose intolerant, you want to eat more, and you don't metabolize what you eat well."

Young people can get by on very little sleep or at times on no sleep at all because they are often involved with non sleeping activities which burn those extra calories. This leads to thinking that sleep is not all that important, but once we get a little older, it is clear that we need to plan our lives around good sleeping habits in order to function effectively in our waking world.

What's Keeping You From A Good Night's Sleep, and from shedding those extra pounds? There are many reasons that contribute to not sleeping well. A leading cause is depression. Depression is not well understood by most people although many people suffer from it not withstanding. Depressed people often cannot turn of their negative thought patterns and this interferes with their sleeping habits. There are many precursors to a full blown diagnosis of depression which can also interfere negatively with sleep patterns.

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