The Sleep Diet

I gotta lose ten pounds by Christmas. Maybe I'll turn in early tonight and instead of going for that run in the morning maybe I'll just sleep in.

Word now that getting too little sleep is the potential cause of all kinds of medical problems, notably obesity -- but also colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Don't take my word for it. The Washington Post says so:

"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."

The way it works is that when you don't sleep enough you screw up your body's internal clock (which, I believe, is located just to the left of your aorta, but I could be wrong). Anyway, it disrupts your hormones that regulate appetite. Which means that not only are you bleary-eyed and falling asleep during meetings but you're also hungry. When you don't sleep, your body goes into high alert, increases the production of stress hormones and revs up your blood pressure -- which is a recipe for heart attacks and strokes. Sigh...

Honestly, I'd guess I get an average of six hours a day, some days even less, but more on only a few days. Based on those insurance charts, I'm also overweight and on high blood pressure medicine. I'd like to get more sleep but it would probably mean giving up my TiVO and bulking the hard drives on my computers. When would I answer e-mail?

I remember having no body fat in college and managing to sleep twelve hours a day. My parents thought I had narcolepsy but it turns out I was a health nut.

G'night... gotta catch some zzzzz's...