More sleep means less calories according to Jawbone data
We have written recently about Sleep Awareness Week. This is an annual event of the National Sleep Foundation which ran from March 6th to March 13th, to encourage the public to prioritize sleep to improve their overall health and well-being. What you probably didn’t know, is that this all leads up to Friday, March 18, 2016, when World Sleep Day will be celebrated all over the globe.
World Sleep Day (WSD) is an annual event that calls to action important issues related to sleep using collaborative efforts energized by sleep professionals all over the world. The focus of WSD is to bring cognizance to the many burdens of sleep problem and efforts that are being taken toward the prevention and management of sleep disorders.
More and more health and fitness wearables these days are offering advanced sleep tracking. Using a sleep tracker lets you keep tabs on your sleep quality and understand how it can be affected by your lifestyle choices.
Its no secret that we are fans of Jawbone’s UP3’s sleep monitoring capabilities. The tracker provides detailed information on time of nodding and waking, light, deep and REM sleep stages, and it has the ability to automatically recognise when you fall asleep. The app also offers guidance on how to improve your sleep quality.
Jawbone occasionally peaks into data provided by its UP community to bring us some interesting insights. Their latest blog article aggregates data from its user base to show how sleep influences our calorie intake. The company sampled data from hundreds of thousands users and averaged over multiple nights of sleep and next-day calories logged within a user.
According to the study, on average, UP users went to bed at 11:34. As the chart below shows, both normal-weight UP users and UP users who are overweight or obese logged fewer calories the next day if they went to bed early. So, for example, someone of normal weight who went to bed at about 9:30 in the evening, logged 220 fewer calories the next day compared to someone who went to bed at 2:30 am.
The data also shows that early birds made healthier choices the next day in terms of their food intake. To determine which foods were more frequently eaten by users with early (7pm-11pm) versus late bedtimes (11pm-3am), Jawbone sampled millions of meal entries and limited the data to frequently logged foods.
Sleep is essential for a person’s health and wellbeing, yet millions of people do not get enough of it. It is estimated that at least 40 million Americans suffer from over 70 different sleep disorders and 60% of adults report having sleep problems a few nights a week or more.
Knowing how you’re sleeping at night can be a huge first step toward making improvements in the quality of your sleep, and by extension your overall mental and physical wellbeing. If you’re looking to purchase a sleep tracker and get on the path to wellness, you’ve got quite a few choices.
