Sleep, Food, Exercise, and Weight

There are more and more articles linking poor quality sleep with weight gain and vice versa.

clipped from www.healthday.com High-Fat Diet Can Disrupt Body's Clock Like a midnight raid on the fridge for junk food -- sleep often suffers, study says TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- There's more bad news about a high-fat diet -- it disrupts the body's 24-hour internal (circadian) clock, which regulates sleeping, waking, eating, as well as the daily rhythms of many metabolic functions, U.S. researchers say. The team also found that a high-fat diet caused changes in genes that encode the circadian clock in the brain and in peripheral tissues (such as fat), resulting in reduced expression of these genes. "The answer is, yes; alterations in feeding affect timing. We found that as an animal on a high-fat diet gains weight, it eats at the inappropriate time for its sleep/wake cycle -- all of the excess calories are consumed when the animal should be resting. For a human, that would be like raiding the refrigerator in the middle of the night and binging on junk food," Bass said.