Can more sleep help with weight loss?

On ZOE Science & Nutrition ("Forget crash diets: How to maintain a healthy weight", August 2025), host Jonathan Wolf asked nutrition researcher and coach Alan Aragon where he would begin with a new client in midlife who wants to lose a little weight. In that conversation Aragon didn't start with meals, macros or exercise. He asked how much the person sleeps, whether it feels like enough, and what their history with sleep has been.

sleep is the X factor for a lot of the success or failure in programs.

Alan Aragon, ZOE Science & Nutrition, 2025

Why he starts there

Aragon gave two reasons. Short nights leave less energy for being active. They also, he said, turn up appetite and cravings, especially for rich, very tasty food, which is what tired people tend to reach for. Then he described a study that went the other way: people who habitually slept little were coached to sleep more, and they ended up eating less. His summary was simple: get the sleep right first.

ZOE sells nutrition tests and products, and Aragon coaches clients for a living, so treat the framing as his practice. The study he described is real, and it's one this program draws on.

What the research says

The trial is Esra Tasali's, published in 2022. Eighty adults aged 21 to 40, with overweight, who usually slept less than six and a half hours, were split into two groups. One group got a single personal session of sleep advice, aimed at more time in bed. The other kept their usual nights. Nobody was told to change what they ate or how they moved.

Aragon remembered the goal as two extra hours. What people actually gained, measured with a wrist device, was about 1.2 hours a night. Over the two weeks of the trial, the group sleeping longer ate less than the group that didn't.

The study has limits. It was two weeks long, in younger adults, at one center. Other studies point the same way with their own caveats. In a small trial of ten adults who were cutting back on food, short nights shifted the weight lost away from fat. And a large review found that adults who sleep less are more likely to have a higher weight, though that kind of study shows a link, not a cause.

So sleep won't do the work alone, but a short night makes everything else harder. That's a good reason to treat bedtime as part of your eating plan.

How this fits the Lose weight sustainably program

Sleep has its own chapter in the program. The third paid chapter, "The evening, to sleep", walks from dinner to bed: you plan dinner on a plate and a bedtime that fits your mornings, starting with thirty minutes earlier when your nights are short, with a reminder on your phone. It sits next to the habits for your first meal and your long gap, because hunger and tiredness tend to meet in the same evening. Start Lose weight sustainably; the first chapter is free.

Source: ZOE Science & Nutrition, "Forget crash diets: How to maintain a healthy weight" with Alan Aragon and Sarah Berry, 14 August 2025 Research: Tasali et al, Effect of sleep extension on energy intake among adults with overweight (2022) · Nedeltcheva et al, Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity (2010) · Cappuccio et al, Meta-analysis of short sleep duration and obesity (2008)