London - Have you been getting enough beauty sleep lately? If
not, this might encourage you to turn in a little earlier.
According to scientists, getting less than five and a half hours
of sleep a night could see you to gain nearly a stone (about
6kg) in a year. They say that even if diet and exercise habits
remained the same, the changes in the body’s metabolism can
cause the pounds to pile on. The team of researchers believe
this could explain why people tend to become larger as they get
older and often struggle to get enough sleep at night. They also
think it could explain why night shift workers who struggle to
sleep during the day are more prone to being overweight. The
academics from Boston compared the effects of sleep on 21
volunteers over six weeks. They started off having ten hours of
sleep a night but this was then reduced to just over five and a
half hours at any time during the day. Often volunteers were
attempting to doze off during the day time when their body clock
was telling them that they s