Sleep Less, Weigh More: 78 Minutes Stole a Pound
--- In Singapore, I learned to sleep badly.
Sleep Less, Weigh More: 78 Minutes Stole a Pound
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In Singapore, I learned to sleep badly. The city runs on ambition and air conditioning, and somewhere between the two, I started treating rest as a variable rather than a requirement — something I could compress on busy weeks and recover on weekends. I was twenty-six and certain I knew better than my body. I didn't.
A study published this month has the number I wish someone had handed me then: seventy-eight minutes. That's the average sleep reduction — not dramatic, not the all-nighter we associate with deprivation — that led adults to gain nearly a pound over six weeks while becoming measurably more sedentary. Seventy-eight minutes is one episode of television. One long dinner that ran past ten. One night of lying awake listening to a city that won't quiet down.
What makes this research worth sitting with is how ordinary the deficit is. This wasn't a study of people pulling night shifts or managing newborns. It was the kind of mild, chronic shortfall that most working adults would barely register as a problem. The weight gain wasn't dramatic either — but the direction was consistent and the mechanism is well understood. Sleep deprivation disrupts ghrelin and leptin, the hormones that govern hunger and satiety, nudging appetite upward while simultaneously making the body more reluctant to move. You eat a little more. You move a little less. The scale shifts before you've noticed anything has changed.
This matters alongside the other thread running through the research right now — the conversation about weight loss drugs, retatrutide, GLP-1s, the pharmaceutical interventions that genuinely move the number on the scale. What's quieter in that conversation is the foundational infrastructure those interventions sit on. A drug can change appetite signalling. It cannot rebuild the cortisol regulation that chronic under-sleep destroys, or replace the deep slow-wave sleep during which the body does its real metabolic work.
In Valletta in July, sleeping badly is almost architectural. The heat doesn't leave the stone walls until two in the morning. I know this. I still keep the windows open because I cannot bear to seal out the sound of the harbour. Some choices are worth their consequences. Most sleep loss isn't a choice at all — it's accumulated, invisible, unremarkable until the body starts keeping its own accounts.
One thing to try: move dinner an hour earlier for the next two weeks. The research on evening meal timing and sleep quality is consistent enough to be practical — and it costs nothing except a shift in habit.
*By Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*
