Most of the advice people with type 2 diabetes get includes denying yourself of something you love.
You can’t eat this, you can’t do that.
So you may welcome a new study, published in the January 2016 edition of the journal Diabetes Care, that shows how indulging in a specific pleasant activity over the weekend can undo damage done to your blood sugar level.
We’ve known for some time now that lack of sleep can cause or worsen type 2 diabetes. But sometimes we simply can’t get a full 8 hours sleep during our busy week.
So should we catch up over the weekend? That’s the question the new research answers.
The researchers invited 19 healthy, lean men to sleep in the laboratory for an approximately normal night’s sleep. They slept an average of 7.8 hours per night.
Following this normal sleep schedule, they were placed on the sleep deprivation schedule that involved 4.5 hours of sleep per night for four consecutive nights.
They were then placed on a recovery sleep schedule to catch up the sleep they lost. They slept an average of 9.7 hours per night.
After each of these three schedules, the researchers measured their blood glucose control.
After the four nights of deprivation sleep, their insulin sensitivity dropped by 23% over the level they showed after the normal sleep schedule at the beginning of the experiment. Another diabetes measure, called the disposition index, also worsened by 16%.
After the recovery sleep schedule, both these measures returned to normal, showing that recovery sleep can, at least in the short term, undo the diabetes risk that short term sleep deprivation creates.
Of course this study is quite small, so it may not translate directly into your life situation. But it does indicate that catching up on sleep is better than being sleep deprived for a long time.
But to completely reverse type 2 diabetes, sleeping is not enough. For that you need to follow the solid 3-step strategy found here…