On Wednesday, June 30th, I presented a lecture entitled, “Was Atkins Right? The Debate about Carbs and Dietary Fat” at St. Francis Hospital. And now we are about to start offering a weight loss program as part of the treatment of sleep apnea and other chronic medical disorders such as hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
During the presentation, I discussed the importance of dietary balance and the consequences of consuming too much fat and too many carbohydrates.
You may wonder why a sleep specialist would be interested in speaking about weight loss. The answer is that sleep problems and obesity are closely tied.
According to the Center for Disease Control, more than one third of U.S. adults, or more than 72 million people and 16 percent of U.S. children are obese. Another one third of Americans are over weight.
Research shows that sleep deprivation is associated with weight gain. Obesity is associated with many serious health problems, including sleep apnea.
One study showed that teens who slept less than eight hours during the school week were more likely to be obese than their peers who did obtain eight hours of sleep or more during the school week.
Researchers believe that sleep deprivation interferes with hormones that affect your body mass index. Those who do not get enough sleep tend to have lower levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses your appetite and increases your metabolism. As a result, people who are not getting the sleep they need may eat more. Additionally, studies have shown that people who are sleep deprived tend to crave more unhealthy food.
While getting enough sleep (typically seven to eight hours a night) will not result in instant weight loss, it is as important a factor as diet and exercise in improving your mental and physical health.
I believe that sound sleep, healthy food and adequate physical activity are the three pillars that support a long and healthy life. To that end, I will begin offering weight loss as a treatment option for patients with sleep apnea and other chronic conditions that can be ameliorated with weight loss. An essential tool that I will use is a bio-impedence machine to analyze body composition, i.e. the percentage of the body that is lean muscle, water and fat. It is essential to know that when a patient is losing weight that indeed it is fat that is being lost and not muscle. If muscle is lost, then the metabolic rate decreases and even if you consume the same amount of calories, you will start to gain weight. This is why people yo-yo and end up larger and larger as they repeatedly try diets without monitoring what is being lost when they lose weight. With each successive diet attempt, they end up having a larger percentage of their body being composed of fat and less of muscle. As the lean muscle mass decreases, they would have to eat less and less just to remain the same weight because the metabolic rate goes lower and lower with each diet attempt.
