Study: Losing Weight with a High-Protein Diet Can Help You Sleep Better

A lack of sleep can make it harder for you to lose weight. Research shows if you don't get enough sleep, you tend to make poor eating decisions.

Not getting enough sleep can also have a negative affect on the hormones that control hunger, causing sleep-deprived people to be hungry and more likely to store fat.

A study at Purdue University, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, looked at the effects of weight loss on sleep. They found overweight people on high-protein diets were able to sleep better, after four weeks of weight loss.

"This research adds sleep quality to the growing list of positive outcomes of higher-protein intake while losing weight, and those other outcomes include promoting body fat loss, retention of lean body mass and improvements in blood pressure," Campbell said.

"Sleep is recognized as a very important modifier of a person’s health, and our research is the first to address the question of how a sustained dietary pattern influences sleep. We've showed an improvement in subjective sleep quality after higher dietary protein intake during weight loss, which is intriguing and also emphasizes the need for more research with objective measurements of sleep to confirm our results." - Science Daily

So a diet high in protein not only helps you lose weight, but also sleep better.