Lose weight while you sleep. It sounds like something you’d hear on a late night infomercial — just around the time you are reaching for that bag of cookies because, well, you can’t sleep.

But as wild as the idea sounds, substantial medical evidence suggests some fascinating links between sleep and weight. Researchers say that how much you sleep and quite possibility the quality of your sleep may silently orchestrate a symphony of hormonal activity tied to your appetite.

“One of the more interesting ideas that has been smoldering and is now gaining momentum is the appreciation of the fact that sleep and sleep disruption do remarkable things to the body — including possibly influencing our weight,” says David Rapoport, MD, associate professor and director of the Sleep Medicine Program at the New York University School of Medicine in New York City.

While doctors have long known that many hormones are affected by sleep, Rapoport says it wasn’t until recently that appetite entered the picture. What brought it into focus, he says, was research on the hormones leptin and ghrelin. First, doctors say that both can influence our appetite. And studies show that production of both may be influenced by how much or how little we sleep.

In fact, have you ever experienced a sleepless night followed by a day when no matter what you ate you never felt full or satisfied? If so, then you have experienced the workings of leptin and ghrelin.

How Hormones Affect Your Sleep

Leptin and ghrelin work in a kind of “checks and balances” system to control feelings of hunger and fullness, explains Michael Breus, PhD, a faculty member of the Atlanta School of Sleep Medicine and director of The Sleep Disorders Centers of Southeastern Lung Care in Atlanta. Ghrelin, which is produced in the gastrointestinal tract, stimulates appetite, while leptin, produced in fat cells, sends a signal to the brain when you are full.

So what’s the connection to sleep? “When you don’t get enough sleep, it drives leptin levels down, which means you don’t feel as satisfied after you eat. Lack of sleep also causes ghrelin levels to rise, which means your appetite is stimulated, so you want more food,” Breus tells WebMD.

The two combined, he says, can set the stage for overeating, which in turn may lead to weight gain.

Studies: Those Who Sleep Less Often Weigh More

How the hormones leptin and ghrelin set the stage for overeating was recently explored in two studies conducted at the University of Chicago in Illinois and at Stanford University in California.

In the Chicago study, doctors measured levels of leptin and ghrelin in 12 healthy men. They also noted their hunger and appetite levels. Soon after, the men were subjected to two days of sleep deprivation followed by two days of extended sleep. During this time doctors continued to monitor hormone levels, appetite, and activity.

Studies: Those Who Sleep Less Often Weigh More continued…

The end result: When sleep was restricted, leptin levels went down and ghrelin levels went up. Not surprisingly, the men’s appetite also increased proportionally. Their desire for high carbohydrate, calorie-dense foods increased by a whopping 45%.

It was in the Stanford study, however, that the more provocative meaning of the leptin-ghrelin effect came to light. In this research — a joint project between Stanford and the University of Wisconsin — about 1,000 volunteers reported the number of hours they slept each night. Doctors then measured their levels of ghrelin and leptin, as well as charted their weight.

The result: Those who slept less than eight hours a night not only had lower levels of leptin and higher levels of ghrelin, but they also had a higher level of body fat. What’s more, that level of body fat seemed to correlate with their sleep patterns. Specifically, those who slept the fewest hours per night weighed the most.

Eating and Sleep Apnea: The New Connection

As a result of these and other studies, researchers began to theorize that getting more sleep just might be the answer to society’s burgeoning waistline. But before you trade the cost of your gym membership for a pricey new mattress, take note: Experts also say the relationship is not as obvious as it seems.

The reason: Enter the somewhat mysterious nocturnal ailment known as “obstructive sleep apnea.” People with sleep apnea may stop breathing for up to a minute, sometimes hundreds of times during the night while sleeping, says Dominic Roca, MD, director of the Connecticut Center for Sleep Medicine at Stamford Hospital.

Though the exact cause of the problem remains unknown, Roca and others believe that in most instances physical abnormalities inside the mouth and neck cause the soft tissue in the rear of the throat to collapse. This briefly closes off air passages many times during a night, causing disruption in breathing and a tendency to snore.

The end result: Although you may go to bed early and think you are getting a good night’s rest, the disruption in breathing prevents you from getting deep sleep. Eight hours of disrupted shut eye can leave you feeling like you had only four.

“You wake up feeling tired and continue to feel tired all day,” Roca tells WebMD.

As a child there were them times
I didn’t get it but you kept me in line
I didn’t know why you didn’t show up sometimes
It’s something more than saying “I miss you”
But when we talked too
All them grown folk things
Separation brings
You never let me know it
You never let it show because
You loved me and obviously
There’s so much more left to say
If you were with me today face to face

[Chorus:]
I never knew I could hurt like this
And everyday life goes on like
“I wish I could talk to you for awhile”
“I wish I could find a way try not to cry”
As time goes by
And soon as you reach a better place
Still I’ll give the whole world to see your face
And I’m right here next to you
It feels like you gone too soon
The hardest thing to do is say bye bye

(Bye Bye [3x])
Bye bye

And you never got the chance to see how good I’ve done
And you never got to see me back at number one
I wish that you were here to celebrate together
I wish that we could spend the holidays together

I remember when you used to tuck me in at night
With the Teddy Bear you gave to me that I held so tight
I thought you were so strong
That you can make it through whatever
It’s so hard to accept the fact you’re gone forever

[Chorus]

(bye bye bye bye bye bye [3x])
Bye bye

This is for my peoples who just lost somebody
Your best friend, your baby, your man, or your lady
Put your hand way up high
We will never say bye (no, no, no)
Mamas, daddies, sisters, brothers, friends and cousins
This is for my peoples who lost their grandfather
Lift your head to the sky ’cause we will never say bye

[Chorus]

2. Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin6. “Love is the beauty of the soul.”
–St. Augustine

3. “My night has become a sunny dawn because of you.”
–Ibn Abbad

4. “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”
–Margaret Anderson

5. “In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.”
–Janos Arnay

7. “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”
–Aristotle

8. “Each moment of a happy lover’s hour is worth an age of dull and common life.”
–Aphra Behn

9. “Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.”
–Sarah Bernhardt

10. “In my wildest dreams, you always play the hero. In my darkest hour of night, you rescue me, you save my life.”
–Bliss and Cerney

11. “Come live with me and be my love, and we will some new pleasures prove, of golden sands, and crystal beaches, with silken lines and silver hooks…”
–John Dunne

12. “What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes…”
–Elizabeth Barret Browning

13. “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach…”
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning

14. “Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.”
–Robert Browning
15. “But to see her was to love her, love but her, and love her forever.”
–Robert Burns

16. “She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudness climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes…”
–Lord Byron

17. “Like music on the waters is they sweet voice to me.”
–Lord Byron

18. “I love you, not only for what you are, But for what I am when I am with you.”
–Roy Croft

19. “You’re nothing short of my everything.”
–Ralph Block

20. “The only true gift is a portion of yourself.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

21. “Thou art to me a delicious torment.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. “Love distills desire upon the eyes, love brings bewitching grace into the heart.”
–Euripides

23. “I love her and that’s the beginning of everything.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

24. “I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun-warmed, flower-bordered path.”
–Andre Gide

25. “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
–Robert Heinlein

26. “Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes

27. “What I feel for you seems less of earth and more of a cloudless heaven.”
–Victor Hugo

28. “It’s so easy, To think about Love, To Talk about Love, To wish for Love, But it’s not always easy, To recognize Love, Even when we hold it…. In our hands.”
–Jaka

29. “Two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”
–John Keats

30. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
–Helen Keller

31. “… See there’s this place in me where your fingerprints still rest, your kisses still linger, and your whispers softly echo. It’s the place where a part of you will forever be a part of me.”
–Gretchen Kemp

32. “When you came, you were like red wine and honey, and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.”
–Amy Lowell

33. “Make me immortal with a kiss.”
–Christopher Marlowe

34. “Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”
–Christopher Marlowe

35. “Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.”
–Alphonse Marie de la Martine

36. “In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.”
–Mignon McLaughlin

37. “We came by night to the Fortunate Isles, And lay like fish Under the net of our kisses.”
–Pablo Neruda

38. “The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain signing to it…you and you alone make me feel that I am alive…Other men, it is said, have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.”
–George Moore

39. “In love there are two things: bodies and words.”
–Joyce Carol Oates

40. “I become a waterwheel, turning and tasting you, as long as water moves.”
–Rumi

41. “I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”
–Vita Sackville-West

42. “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

43. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

44. “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
–George Sand

45. “Sometimes your nearness takes my breath away; and all the things I want to say can find no voice. Then, in silence, I can only hope my eyes will speak my heart.”
–Robert Sexton

46. “My heart is ever at your service.”
–William Shakespeare

47. “The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.”
–William Shakespeare

48. “Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.”
–Alexander Smith

49. “I am my beloved, and my beloved is me.”
–Song of Solomon

50. “Her breath is like honey spiced with cloves, Her mouth delicious as a ripened mango.”
–Srzgarakarika

51. “To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.”
–Karen Sunde

52. “Love, till dawn sunder night from day with fire Dividing my delight and my desire…”
–A. C. Swinburne

53. “Love is friendship set on fire.”
–Jeremy Taylor

54. “Within you I lose myself. Without you I find myself wanting to become lost again.”
–Unknown

55. “Somewhere there’s someone who dreams of your smile…”
–Unknown

56. “I see my fated stars in your eyes. They melt me like the sun does snow.”
–Unknown

57. “The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart.”
–Unknown

58. “To be your friend was all I ever wanted; to be your lover was all I ever dreamed.”
–Unknown

59. “If I could reach up and hold a star for every time you made me smile, I would have the whole night sky in the palm of my hand.”
–Unknown

60. “If you love me only in my dreams, let me be asleep forever.”
–Unknown

61. “Kiss me and you will see stars; love me and I will give them to you.”
–Unknown

62. “Love is a dream that comes alive when we meet.”
–Unknown

63. “The soul that can speak with its eyes can also kiss with a gaze.”
–Unknown

64. “Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essense.”
–Vincent van Gogh

65. “Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto.”
–Lope de Vega

66. “Here are fruits, flowers, leaves, and branches, And here is my heart which beats only for you.”
–Paul Verlaine

67. “When a heart finds another, what’s a cloud more or less in the sky?”
–Wolf and Page

68. “The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.
–Josiah G. Holland

69. “From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven. And when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together, and a single brighter light goes forth from their united being.”
–Unknown

70. “The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.”
–Sir Hugh Walpole

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A milestone passed, new things begun, dreams as shining as the sun, a goal achieved, a victory won!That’s Graduation.

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Communication. It’s the first thing we really learn in life. Funny thing is, once we grow up, learn our words and really start talking, the harder it becomes to know what to say, or how to ask for what we really need.

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 ”Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”

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There were two friends named Dimwit and Dimtwat who lived in the Highland. These two ninnies were known for their shady characters and unpleasant behaviour. They looked down on people as if they were slaves.

He’s the greatest person
Anyone could ever imagine,
He’s kind and funny,
He sends love out like magic.

He always knows
Whenever I’m sad,
Whenever I need to cry
He’s there.

Sometimes he’s been
The only one who understood,
My best friend’s
The only one who would.

Next year he’ll be
So very far away,
But next to me
Is how he’ll always stay.

‘Cause you see that my best friend,
Just happens to be my brother,
And Bubba, no matter what
I’ll always love ya.