Ep.4 How sleeping more can help teens lose weight

In this episode, I discuss research that was published in the following scientific journal: 
Is Sleep Duration Associated With Childhood Obesity? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysisObesity (2008) 16, 265–274. doi:10.1038/oby.2007.63
I encourage you to have a discussion with your teen about this.I hope it will help them understand the importance of good sleep. 

I’m Dr. Jenny Gourgari—pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine and a health coach. 
After helping hundreds of teens struggling with their weight and hormones, I’ve created a whole new path by doing what most programs miss: balance puberty hormones naturally and create habits that actually last.

Here's what makes this different:
✅ No dieting. No calorie counting. No shame.
✅ No more food fights between parents and teens.
✅ No weight obsession—just healthy habits
✅ Real science behind how puberty hormones affect weight
✅ A safe, supportive approach that prevents eating disorders

Because when teens understand their hormones and get the right support, they don’t just lose weight—they gain strength, energy, confidence, and freedom!

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Transcript

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Sleep and Pediatric Obesity

Speaker 1 0:04

Are you getting frustrated with what to feed a teenager who is always hungry ? Everybody knows that teenagers have a huge appetite . It seems like you need to feed them constantly to satisfy their hunger . It's even more difficult where teenagers who struggle with their weight truly want to make changes like cut down on junk food or stop ever eating , and they can't . There's frustration , isolation , stress , and that's why I decided to create a recipe collection of 30 easy and healthy meals for teenagers . They're all high in protein to satisfy your teenager's hunger and they can all be ready in less than 30 minutes . If you want to grab a free copy , go to lifestell14scom for the last recipes .

Speaker 2 1:05

This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast . If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight , you are in the right place . If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips , Dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children , because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children . This podcast is for educational purposes only . Dr Gorgary does not provide medical , psychological or nutrition therapy advice . You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host , Dr Jenny Gorgary .

Speaker 1 1:52

Hello , my friends . How are you ? I hope everyone is doing great . I am very excited to be with you for one more episode about obesity and , in particular , pediatric obesity . So today's topic is going to explore the role of sleep in promoting pediatric obesity . So I will give you a brief overview about how sleep may affect the overall risk for obesity . Then I'm going to present the article I have chosen for today's episode . Then we're going to just focus on a few studies that are described in this article and then we're going to come up with some basic conclusions . Okay , let's get started . So why do we even care ? Like , why does sleep has anything to do with obesity ?

Speaker 1 2:54

I'm going to give you one simple example , and this relationship may become more evident to you . Have you ever had a bad night that you didn't sleep well , for whatever reason , and you plan to go exercise the next morning , but because you didn't sleep , you just didn't have the energy to do your planned activity ? Has this ever happened to you ? It has definitely happened to me and it is way more common than you think . And it's not only about exercise that you plan to do first thing in the morning , right , because if you're not sleeping well , you may be able to go to work , go to school , go to college , go to your activities , but by the end of the afternoon your ability to do exercise goes down the hill . It's not that it's impossible to go and do exercise absolutely not . It's very likely . You can still go and exercise , but the amount of willpower , the amount of discipline that is required is way more . Because you're so tired , you need to pull all your strength to go and exercise , whereas if you are rested and you had a very good , you had slept well the night before you can go and exercise and make it easy for you . So this is one very simple way by which , if you're not sleeping well , that can affect your ability to exercise and that can affect your ability to lose weight .

Speaker 1 4:37

It's not only that , though . There are other reasons . For example , have you ever had a night where you didn't sleep well and the next day you were just snacking and eating and you didn't know what was going on with you , but for some reason you were constantly snacking ? Has this occurred to you ? Maybe subconsciously ? It's not necessarily that you actually make those changes , do those choices , but overall your ability to make healthy choices is decreased if you haven't slept well , like , you're more likely to reach out for the chips or the chocolate or whatever junk food is in front of you , instead of reaching out for the fruit or the chicken or whatever healthy choice you had planned for yourself that day . And what is that ? We know from other studies that have been done and have shown that your cognitive ability and your ability to make healthy choices goes down if you have not slept very well , because poor sleep affects your brain function . It affects your cognitive ability to make those healthy choices .

Speaker 1 6:00

And again , it's not that you're not . It's impossible for you to make the healthy choices . That's not at all the case . You may still be sleep deprived and still be able to make those healthy choices , but , once again , it is not easy . It requires more willpower , it requires more discipline for you in order to make those choices . When you're tired and fatigued and don't have enough energy and all you want is let me grab that chocolate because I'm like so sleep deprived , I'm so tired , this chocolate may help you go through my afternoon . And again , we're not talking about once in a while , right , if it's once in a while , probably it's not a big deal . But what if , most nights , this is the situation . What if , most nights , you don't get the recommended amount of sleep that you need ? Then this is part of who you are . This is part of how you behave . This is really an obstacle for you . So by sleeping better , you not only put yourself in the position to be able to exercise more , but you also put yourself in the position to make healthier choices easier . Okay Now , another way by which poor sleep can affect the risk for obesity is that poor sleep can cause hormonal imbalances , and I'm not going to go into too many details because we only have a limited amount of time , but I want to simplify this for you .

Speaker 1 7:56

So we know there are hormones like , for example , there is cortisol , leptin , ghrelin , insulin , growth hormone . Those are hormones that play a role in regulating your energy balance , and these hormones go up and down throughout the day and the night , and if you're not sleeping well , then they're not suppressed . At those hormones , instead of being low , they're high . Because you're not sleeping , you're weak . So your sleep-wake cycle has effects in those hormones that make your body more prone to gaining weight . So your body is like fighting against you instead of for you . And again , it's not that you cannot lose weight because you have slightly higher cortisol , let's say . But it does make it much harder for you to lose weight when your cortisol levels are overall higher than if your cortisol levels are lower , same for other hormones .

Speaker 1 9:10

So by sleeping well , you can put yourself in a better position to lose weight , because you're able to exercise more , you're able to make healthy choices easier for you and you also have less hormonal imbalances because of disturbed sleep . Sounds good . Ready for the article of the today's episode ? The title of the article I'm going to discuss today is is sleep duration associated with childhood obesity a systematic review and meta-analysis ? This paper was published by Dr Ruchen and her group , john Hopkins University , and it was published in Obesity Journal in 2008 . Let me just give you an explanation , brief explanation . When in science we talk systematic review and meta-analysis , what do we mean ? We mean that particular group of researchers try to find all the studies that address childhood obesity and sleep and then they look at their data . They looked at which studies are good studies and then they put all of the results together and then they try to make one conclusion by summarizing all the results and all the data from all these studies . Why do people love systematic reviews ? We'll love them because they explore the results by looking at data from thousands of people . If you have a study , that is a small number of people let's say a hundred or 50 , it's not the same as if you have a study that is 10,000 people . The more thousands of people you have and those are really epidemiological studies the results are more likely to be real than if you only look at studies where the results are done in smaller amount of people .

Sleep's Link to Pediatric Obesity

Speaker 1 11:34

This was one paper that looked at different studies . Let's look at what did they do , the researchers of this project . They looked at all different studies that were published between 1980 and 2007 , and they chose papers . They chose other studies that they looked on sleep and pediatric obesity . I'm not going to go into too many details , but I'm just going to give you the main selection criteria where that they chose studies that enroll children , so they were less than 18 years of age , they had at least 100 subjects . One of each one of the studies had to had at least 100 subjects , they had to have a measure of obesity and they could be different types of study designs . Thank you .

Speaker 1 12:32

Now , one important element that I would like you to pay attention to is how do we classify sleep deprivation in children ? This is very , very important . We know children of different ages don't have the same requirements for sleep , so the way you define . It is different according to a child's age . So for children that they were less than five years of age , the recommended sleep duration is 11 hours or more . For children that are between five and 10 years of age , the recommended sleep duration is 10 hours or more , and for children that are more than 10 years of age , then the recommended hour of sleep is nine or more hours . So any children that were sleeping less than that amount were sleep deprived technically . But then , within the group of the sleep deprived children , there were children that slept only one hour or less than an hour , or two hours or less than the recommended amount . So the shortest amount of sleep for a child that was less than five years of age was if that child slept less than nine hours . For children that they were between five and 10 , the shortest amount of sleep was less than eight hours , and for children that they were more than 10 years of age , the shortest amount of sleep was less than seven hours . So the shortest amount of sleep was , let's say , the most sleep deprived children . Okay , I hope this is clear .

Speaker 1 14:39

Okay , so let's talk about what did they find . So , first of all , they analyzed data from 17 big studies that were meeting the inclusion criteria of this project . They were six studies from United States , five from Europe , four from Asia , one from Australia and one from Canada . So you can see that there is a good representation of children from all around the world . The smallest study among those 17 studies had 150 children , which is still a large amount of people , and the biggest study was 8,941 children , so a really huge study . Most of them were around 1,000 children in each study .

Speaker 1 15:38

So they analyzed all these different studies and what did they find ? Are you ready ? Let me tell you First , what they found was that children that had the shorter sleep duration had a 58% higher risk for overweight or obesity compared to children that had longer sleep duration . I repeat it 58% higher risk for obesity for the children that had the shorter sleep duration . This is huge . And if you just look at the children that they were at the higher risk the children that slept the shortest amount of sleep , which is , as I mentioned earlier , two hours less than the recommended sleep time per age those children actually had an even higher risk 92% higher risk when compared with children that had a longer sleep duration . This is huge . I repeat it , it's crucial and , in fact , for each hour increase in sleep , the risk of overweight or obesity was reduced on average by 9% . So for every one hour more that you sleep , you reduce your risk for obesity by 9% . Okay Now , a second conclusion that came out of the study was that there was a relationship between the amount of sleep and the amount of overweight and obesity , and that was mainly true for children that were less than 10 years of age , not so much in adolescence . So what does that mean ? That means that the shorter you sleep , the higher your weight . So it was like a linear relationship .

Speaker 1 18:25

Another interesting finding from the study was that there was a significant gender difference in the association between sleep and obesity . That study showed that boys were actually more susceptible to sleep deprivation in terms of obesity than girls . This was a conclusion that was the same from three different studies . One , for example , was done in the United States . That study showed that among children that they were between 15 and 18 years of age , the boys that slept less than the recommended amount were at higher risk for obesity , but that was not true for girls . Similar results from another study in Australia in children between seven and 15 years that obesity was negatively related to sleep duration in boys , but not in girls . The third study was done in United Kingdom among 1,294 children between the ages of seven and 18 years of age . Again , it showed that sleep deprivation affected more boys and not so much girls . In other lessons , boys seem to be more affected by sleep deprivation in terms of their risk for obesity than girls , but in those less than 10 years of age that relationship is true across boys and girls . Those are the main three conclusions . The question of why are boys more susceptible to sleep deprivation ? We don't really know why that happens . There are some theories to explain that . For example , one evolutionary theory says that , in general , girls are more susceptible , more resilient , to environmental stressors and they need a severe sleep deprivation in order to have their weight affected . Again , this is just a theory . We don't know if it is true or not , but the results of the studies have shown this association .

Speaker 1 21:15

Ok , so this is everything I had to share with you today . I hope you find that episode helpful . I'm curious to hear what is your experience , what are your challenges , whether you feel your sleep affects your pathway to reach healthy weight , and if you have any particular struggles or challenges that you face . I'd love to hear them and I'd be happy to discuss more about those in future episodes . I will also have more episodes in the future to discuss what can we do to improve our sleep and what can we do to decrease our risk for obesity . I hope you will enjoy the rest of your day and I'll talk to you soon , next week .

Lifestyle & Weight Loss

Speaker 1 22:09

Ok , take care . Bye-bye .

Speaker 2 22:12

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast , I invite you to come check out the LIFT program . It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms , where we take all this information , we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier , more confident , less stressed and love their body again . Visit the website at lifestyleforteenscom and click on the work with me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away . Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens .