Hi there. It's Matt here and welcome back again to the podcast. I'm sure many of you know that

obesity has become a major public health concern and it is so hard for so many people

who are struggling with the battle of maintaining a healthy body weight.

Also, by the way, I think the psychological burden which we just don't recognize enough,

it is equally harmful. What many people do not know, however,

is that the epidemic of obesity that has climbed over the last 60 years has grown in direct

lockstep with the pernicious erosion of sleep time throughout many industrialized nations.

On the podcast before, I've previously spoken about the causal relationships between a lack of sleep, sleep loss, and weight gain.

And if you're interested, you can just go back to episode number 15 and episode number 16 but to perhaps

refresh your memory and perhaps mine as well a couple of examples that we touched on there. First what

we know is that when we look at the big picture epidemiological level there

are strong and significant associations between how little someone sleeps

and how overweight or obese that individual is. Indeed in a meta-analysis, which is simply again, it's a fancy way of saying you just

sum together, you average together all of the prospective studies in a big

statistical bucket and you look at that big picture. What that

meta analysis reported is that short sleep duration increases the likelihood

of developing obesity by 55% in adults and a striking 89% in children.

And we've also discovered that sleep loss will even decrease your resting metabolic rate that only adds to the weight gain problem.

For those who are struggling with sleep, one recommendation that I often provide and that I've written about in my book is meditation.

Now, total transparency, I was a complete skeptic at first. I thought it was all just a little bit, you know, but the data was really strong.

So I tried it and that was seven years ago now and I've since been meditating for 10 minutes before bed every night

The app that I've been using is called calm and I've decided to partner with them here for this

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