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If you eat well and haven’t changed the way you eat, it can feel very unfair to put on weight. It can also be a helpless feeling. When you’re already watching what you consume, making good choices, counting calories, and depriving yourself of “bad” foods, and you see that number creep up on the scale, you can wonder, “Well…what else am I supposed to do?!” You don’t want to make yourself feel hungry in order to maintain a healthy weight. Maybe friends and family tell you to just accept it, saying that, “You can’t have a perfect body forever!” But it’s not really up to them to say that. In fact, there are 80-year-olds in impeccable shape, so being, looking and feeling your best is for all ages. It still is frustrating when you’re struggling to close your jeans and you haven’t made a single change to your diet. What gives?
Food isn’t the only thing that contributes to our figure. Even though calorie consumption is the biggest determining factor of our weight, far more than exercise even, there are other things that can be creeping in and making your weight creep up. Your body is complex, and it’s sensitive. It responds to the smallest of changes in the biggest of ways. So your weight gain could have something to do with a rather surprising factor. Here are non-dietary things that cause weight gain.
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Sleep deprivation
If you needed another reason to clock some more Z, know that your waistline can pay for it if you don’t sleep enough. Several studies have been conducted examining the relationship between sleep and weight and consistently found that those who sleep less tend to have larger waist circumferences than those who sleep more. One study tracked women who followed the same weight loss regimen and were broken into two groups – one sleeping more than the other. The group that slept less lost 55 percent less weight than the group that slept more. Some experts believe the phenomenon is connected to a hormone called leptin. Leptin helps us feel full, and sleep-deprived individuals may have less of it.
