Your New #1 Stay-Healthy Mission: Get More Sleep

http://women.webmd.com/features/your-new-1-stay-healthy-mission-get-more-sleep

Think you don’t have time for eight hours of z’s a night? Here are seven reasons-including trimming your waistline and improving your skin-why you need to fit it in.

We’re a nation of busy women, so while we’re whittling down our to-do lists, sleep often gets the pink slip first. Surveys from the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C., show that women snooze nearly 90 minutes less than the eight hours a night most experts consider a healthy standard. "As a 24-7 society we have this notion that sleep is a waste of time," says James Maas, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Cornell University and author of Power Sleep. In fact, we seem to admire and envy so-called short sleepers like Martha Stewart and Donald Trump, who claim to run their empires on just four hours a night. But when we cheat on sleep, we’re actually jeopardizing our health, making us likelier to catch colds-or develop diabetes. Still not convinced you need to hit the hay earlier? Let the evidence speak for itself.

1 Keep off those extra pounds
Scientists at the Columbia University Medical Center recently discovered that people who logged five hours of sleep a night were 60 percent more likely to be significantly overweight than those who managed to get seven to nine hours. One reason behind the bulge: Tired people eat more. "Sleep deprivation increases hunger by altering levels of leptin and gherelin, hormones that regulate appetite," explains study author James E. Gangwisch, Ph.D. Another theory, according to a new article in the journal Obesity Reviews, poses that the more hours you’re awake, the more you’ll eat. The author suggests that you can cut 6 percent of your daily calorie intake-that’s 120 calories from a 2,000-calorie diet-by sleeping eight hours a night instead of seven.

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