Recent research shows that suffering even a minor amount of sleep deprivation (as little as one week) can result in your eating more and particularly eating more carbohydrates.

In the study, participants who slept only 5 hours per night ended up gaining about two pounds per week due to excess food consumption compared to those who slept a full 9 hours per night.

If anyone should take note of this study, it is definitely parents with young children! It is well-known that the infant period is full of sleepless nights but it is not as though the sleep improves shortly thereafter. Children seem plagued with insomnia, from nightmares to hunger pangs to middle-of-the night illnesses to having difficulty adjusting to daylight savings time.

When I first became a mom, veteran parents often said to me, “You will never sleep the same again.”

It is definitely true. Even when everyone is sleeping soundly, you find your parental instinct waking you to check briefly in the middle of the night to make sure everyone is ok before going back to bed. It is really exhausting to keep up with this schedule night after night, year after year.

Since it is rare that most parents have a night nanny or occasional overnight breaks to allow them to rest fully, in my experience, everyone needs some sort of crutch to help them get through these early childhood years. We all pick our “poison” of choice:

Until this month, I was definitely a sugar/chocolate/carbohydrate girl. If I got tired, I went right for them, whatever was at hand. It takes a lot of discipline and retraining to stop doing that and just suffer through the tiredness. You get pretty much zero energy boost from eating vegetables. Proteins help a little but they are slower and more long-term in their energy-boosting capability.

Recently, I was reading a nutritional article about insulin and apparently eating all these carbohydrates can really be damaging your body over time. The more sugars you are eating the more insulin your body is producing to reduce the amount of sugar in your body and the less effective insulin becomes as a sugar-removing agent in your body.

Apparently it is very difficult to make a medical diagnosis of insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes) but WebMD indicates that the following are risk factors:

Waist size. A waist size of 40 inches or more in men and 35 inches or more in women
Fats and cholesterol in the blood. Increased triglycerides or low HDL (High blood pressure. 130/85 or higher
Blood glucose levels. 100 mg/dL or above (Australian doctor and nutritionist Sandra Cabot advises 97 mg/dL or above), or being treated for diabetes

Dr. Cabot also suggests the following signs:
Acne and large pores on the face
Skin tags
Hunger and cravings for sugar or carbohydrate rich foods.

So, what is the solution for parents who want to stay healthy?

Obviously, the ideal solution would be for parents to get the occasional break to get a full-night’s rest or at least a good afternoon nap. This is very hard to achieve unless you have an excellent support network or enough money to afford nighttime child care.

For most of us, the best we can do is to retrain our bodies not to eat (and especially not to eat carbs) when we are tired. It is definitely hard but at least from the experimenting I have done this month, it can be done. There is a lot of resistance to overcome at first but it does get gradually easier.

Do you have a healthy parenting exhaustion remedy? Please share in the comments.