
Are your sleep habits making you fat, nasty and dumb? - lurkage
http://jonathanfields.com/blog/are-your-sleep-habits-making-you-fat-nasty-and-dumb/
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aantix
Just to add my own story to the article.

I've always been a heavier guy, even with exercise and proper dieting. A
couple years back I had issues with extremely high blood pressure spikes. It
landed me in the hospital for a few days.

After my wife watched a medical show on Discovery Channel she came to me one
day and says "Maybe you should get checked for sleep apnea?"

At that time on most weekends I could sleep for 13 hours straight and wake up
still feeling exhausted.

Went and had a sleep study done and the results showed that I woke up over 150
times throughout the night and never entered REM sleep. With a CPAP machine I
awoke only once.

The CPAP has change my life. Because I have more quality sleep I have more
energy for exercising and have dropped another 20 lbs because of it. I work
out 4-5 times a week. My quality of life has improved ten-fold.

So if you're a larger person that feels like the energy is drained from you,
has problems getting the motivation to follow through on a physical fitness
plan, and _especially_ if you're a loud snorer, you should get a sleep study
done.

While wearing a CPAP to bed isn't going to get you laid, you'll quickly
realize how much life you've been missing out on because of your poor sleep.

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sh1mmer
It's an interesting article with some excellent information. However, I don't
like the implication that your eating or exercising habits don't matter or
aren't significant.

I find it annoying that often people highlight one aspect of a healthly
lifestyle by attempting to claim the highlighting of another aspect is
overblown.

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Andys
Well said. My eating habits are making causing my sleep problems :-)

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Xichekolas
You know, I'd agree that sleep deprivation leads to all sorts of horrible
things, but saying lack of sleep has caused American obesity is like saying
the relentless decline in the number of Pirates has led to global warming.
Correlation != Causation.

As the canonical example, Spaniards sleep on average 40 minutes less than
other Europeans, with all sorts of detrimental effects (highest incidence of
workplace accidents), but they are a fairly thin population.

Everyone is looking for a quick fix to getting fat. There isn't one. Eat less
food and more healthy food, and do something that requires physical exertion.

~~~
noonespecial
_the relentless decline in the number of Pirates has led to global warming_

Damn ninjas! The way to stop global warming is to eradicate all of those pesky
ninjas so the indigenous pirate populations can recover. I knew it all along.

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Tichy
It could be correlation rather than causation (except for extreme case like
the sleep apnea of aantix).

