Pesky Statistics

Yesterday, I met with friends and we were talking about anything and everything when one of them mentioned that they had read an article a while ago that claimed that the less sleep one gets, the fatter one weighs. Hmm. Well, I know some people who are not sleepy AND fat but, never mind… It seems that researchers found evidence that points to less sleep = hormonal changes = appetite increases = fat ass.

Well, I can just imagine telling some of my other friends about this.

Alice: Hey, you guys! There’s a new diet plan we can try and we don’t have to worry about how we are going to keep away from the refrigerator!

Friends: Awesome! Tell us, tell us…

Alice: Well, all we have to do is sleep… a lot.

Friends *not jumping with glee*: Sleep? A lot? We get enough sleep as it is.

Alice: Well, if you count going to bed at 4:00 a.m. and getting up at 7:30 a.m. that same morning a lot, then I guess you do.

Friends: O.K. We can try going to bed earlier. Let’s try tonight. Let’s see. If we go to bed at, say, 7:00 p.m., we can get up at 6:00 p.m. the next day. How much do you think we would lose?

Alice: How will we go to sleep at 7:00 tonight, huh? We won’t be sleepy. We’ll still be fat, but not sleepy.

Friends: We know! How about if we drink ourselves into a stupor? Yeah, we’ll drink and drink, then get very sleepy and, voila, off to dreamland.

Alice: Guys. If we drink all that then we have added a million calories to our day! The point is to lose it not abuse it.

Friends *thinking so hard their eyes cross*: We know! Instead of waking up at 6:00 p.m. tomorrow, we can sleep even later. Maybe wake up at midnight! That should give us plenty of time to make up for the drinking. Then, to celebrate our “loss” we could go to our favorite loser bar and toast our success!

Alice: Oh, hang on! The study was done with people from southeastern Virginia who were OLD and OBESE. And it says that normal weight people there got 1.9 hours a week more sleep than the fatties.

Friends *using the thinking caps again*: WHAT? Southeastern Virginia? We thought this was a serious study using serious people who don’t breathe in massive amounts of southern food and…

Alice: Please! No need to be so unkind and rude! Well, maybe we don’t need to follow this; it won’t work for us, anyway.

Friends*depressed*: We’re depressed.

Alice*depressed*: I’m depressed.

So in order to cheer ourselves up, we walked (great exercise) over to loser bar and drank away our sorrows. And pledged that we would go to sleep at 3:00 a.m. After all, it didn’t hurt to try it...just in case…