What Your Bedtime Means For Diabetes Weight Management

There are various bits of popular lore floating around, like “don’t eat close to bedtime unless you want to store more of it as fat”; see for example:

Fasting, eating earlier in the day or eating fewer meals – what works best for weight loss?

But what’s this about bedtime making a difference to weight management in diabetes?

You snooze, you lose… pounds?

Researchers (Dr. Susan Kohl Malone et al.) did a study with 196 adults aged 21–64 with prediabetes, who habitually slept less than 6.5 hours per night.

On which note: Can We Get Away With Sleeping Under 7 Hours?

And if you’ve any doubts: Why 7 Hours Sleep Is Not Enough

Anyway, in this study, participants completed an eight-week diabetes prevention lifestyle program covering healthy eating, physical activity, and stress management; one group also received sleep coaching focused on sleep hygiene, improving sleep habits, and gradually moving bedtime earlier.

This is the sort of effort we were talking about in our article: Early Bird Or Night Owl? Genes vs Environment

Of the main outcomes measured:

• Glucose management: neither group experienced significant improvements in glucose levels, including the percentage of time blood glucose was above 140 mg/dL. So that was a bit disappointing, but this too is an important reason to do science, even if it sometimes simply disproves a hypothesis, then we still learned something! In this case, what it doesn’t do.
• Sleep and weight: listing these two together, as both groups improved their sleep and lost weight, with no significant differences in overall weight loss or sleep duration between groups; however, the sleep-coaching group had greater improvements in self-reported sleep quality and reduced daytime sleepiness.
• Bedtime management: sleep onset shifted significantly earlier in the sleep-coaching group, and a post hoc analysis found that each hour earlier participants fell asleep was associated with approximately 0.6 kilograms (1.3 pounds) greater weight loss over eight weeks, independently of sleep duration.

Which is a statistically significant difference, and do note, that’s additional weight loss per hour of earlier sleep, not in total.

So for example, two hours earlier bedtime = 2.6 pounds more weight lost

Per the lead researcher,

❝While we expected that extending sleep would improve glucose levels and weight loss in adults with prediabetes who sleep for shorter periods, this wasn’t the case in our study.

However, our findings do raise the possibility that earlier sleep onset, independent of sleep duration, could be a promising target for improving metabolic health❞

As for the paper itself, you can find it here: Randomized Controlled Trial of Lifestyle Plus Sleep Extension Intervention on Adults With Prediabetes and Short Sleep

This is also quite consistent with what we wrote about here: Losing Sleep = Gaining Pounds

Want to sleep better too?

With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:

• Get Better Sleep: Beyond The Basics
• Calculate (And Enjoy) The Perfect Night’s Sleep
• Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors

…as well as pointers to other relevant articles.

Sweet dreams!