Lifestyle

Sleeping with Lights (& TV) on Would Lead to Weight Gain for Women

2019-06-16 , 9:00 am

Last Updated on 2020-12-21 , 7:00 pm

Trust me, I know how it feels to have tried all you can in losing weight.

Doing things like going on strict diets and incorporating exercise routines in your lifestyle, yet find no results at the end of it all.

Then you start to get sad, and eat some cake for it makes you happier even for just a little while, then you gain more weight and get even sadder.

It’s a tragic cycle.

However, if you’ve ever questioned yourself as to why you just can’t seem to lose much weight via those methods, there just might be one teeny tiny, small factor leading to weight gain that you’re missing out on.

If You Sleep With The Lights On…

There’s a new study showing that women who were exposed to artificial forms of light such as from a nightlight or television while sleeping had an increased risk of gaining weight as well as obesity.

Yep, something as simple as that could affect our weight concerns.

As Much As 5KG

In the study published in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine on 11 June, Monday, it was found that sleeping with a television or light on in the room was positively associated with women gaining five kilograms over a five-year period. It may not look like a lot, but that IS A LOT.

The data had been retrieved from a nationwide cohort study in the US that documented women’s sleeping habits and BMI between 2003 to 2009, a total of 43,722 women between the ages of 35 to 74.

The women self-reported their sleeping habits, which were categorised as such: no light, small nightlight in the room, a light outside of the room, and light or television in the room.

The More Light, The More You May Gain Weight

It was found that sleeping with a television or light on in the room was associated with gaining five kilograms or more, a BMI increase of at least 10%, and a higher risk of being overweight or obese within this five-year period of study, as compared to not being exposed to artificial light while sleeping.

Dale Sandler, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina and senior author of the study, said: “There was a dose response, in that the more light in the room the stronger the association.”

She added that there was a 17% chance of women gaining those five kilograms. There was also a 22% chance of becoming overweight and a 33% chance of becoming obese.

What’s The Difference?

Now, you may not really know the difference, but being overweight and being obese is slightly different. While being overweight simply just means you weigh too much, obesity means having too much body fat. They’re both measured with the BMI scale, though.

“We are in the middle of an obesity epidemic in the United States and the things that we usually think about for obesity prevention are hard for people to do – eat a better diet, get more exercise, and we don’t seem to be making a dent. If these study findings are true and if they can be replicated then it’s a very easy public health message to turn off the lights when you’re sleeping,” she added further.

However, There Are Limitations

As with most research studies, there are bound to be limitations and this has its fair share of those as well. Firstly, there’s only an association between light exposure when we’re sleeping and weight gain.

There’s no direct cause and effect relationship between the two.

The data used in the study were also self-reported by the women who were studied, so they might have given inaccurate answers due to forgetfulness or lying to make themselves seem better – they weren’t actually asked why they left the lights on while sleeping.

Despite that, there was actually another study done in 2016 that linked increased light exposure at night with a 10% increase in body mass index over a 10-year period in older adults, in line with this study, so it may just be true.

Healthy Sleep Starts With No Technology

According to Dr Nathaniel Watson, a professor of neurology and director of the Harborview Sleep Clinic at the University of Washington in Seattle, they recommend that people should remove television sets and other technology out of the bedroom environment to facilitate healthy sleep.

The study “indicates that we need to respect our sleep and respecting our sleep means making a sleep environment devoid of any type of light ideally.”

Professor Malcolm von Schantz, a professor of chronobiology at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom also felt that the study could have been done better if the women had “been wearing instruments that measured their activity as well as the exact amount of light they were exposed to, rather than depending on self-reports – but the findings make perfect biological sense.”

I guess we can expect there to be more studies regarding this fascinating correlation in the near future, then. We’ll try almost anything to lose weight, so hey, we need answers!

For now though, if you want to make a change in your body weight, you can start from trying to turning off all your lights when you’re sleeping to prevent further unwanted weight gain.

Don’t worry, there aren’t any monsters hiding under your bed in the dark, and if there are, they’d be the ones holding cake tempting you even further.

Featured Image: releon8211 / Shutterstock.com