Should Part of Your Diet Be an Earlier Bedtime?

A very interesting study has just been released that makes a connection we would have never made ourselves: that between your bedtime and your weight gain.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley followed over 3,000 subjects from adolescence in 1996 all the way up to 2009. Looking at as much as the could, and checking in on them three times through the years, they plotted their sleep times, diets and other factors.

And they found that it wasn’t the kind of sleep people got, necessarily, or the amount of hours, but what time they went to bed. From the article: “The researchers found that each hour later bedtime during the school or workweek was associated with about a two-point increase in B.M.I.”

Now, even the researchers are saying there are a lot of questions about their findings, as their data included self-reporting and a lack of the subjects’ full diet and their waist circumference, a value indicator of weight.

But even if this isn’t watertight, you are still unlikely getting enough sleep, and the best way to fix that is to go to bed earlier. Put the phone down, turn the TV off, and slip under the sheets an hour earlier tonight. You may wake up a little thinner.