If you truly want to lose weight then there is one practically unknown part of your life that you will need to get right. It is how you sleep - how much and how well. It can be the crucial part that determines if you’ll succeed losing weight or not.

However, one of the things that are very important to your health and to maintaining a healthy weight is either barely discussed or ignored completely. A lack of sleep or sleep disorders can make losing weight very difficult, if not impossible.

You might wonder what sleep could possibly have to do with healthy weight. The answer is very simple: your body’s metabolism changes when you sleep. Sleep is the way that your body recharges and resets itself and all of its vital functions. When you can’t sleep, your body cannot accomplish this resetting task and rhythms are thrown off because of it. Once your metabolism is out of rhythm in any way it is very difficult to get it back to where it needs to be.

A simple illustration to show how important sleep is: Your body is a truly intricate mechanism. The food you eat contains "body fuel", calories.

After the body gets all of the calories that it needs to burn for fuel, it will start to store the excess in the fat cells which swell and make us fat. How quickly or slowly we burn these calories is called our metabolism. This rate of energy burn is different for everybody- some people just have a naturally high metabolism, while others are usually a little sluggish.

At night, our body goes into a slower mode, finishing up the end of the day business, before it stokes the fire and shuts down for the night. But having trouble falling asleep or suffering from other sleep disorders can mean that the body does not get to complete all of the tasks that it needs to, before starting a whole new day.

Imagine an office worker: imagine a pile in your "in tray" that you ought to go through before the day is done. When you are behind things start to pile up and what should get done is not done.

Another issue that relates - sleep disorders and sleep deprivation to weight gain is the lack of conscious control of your eating and poor decision making skills. Think of the last time that you were feeling really tired and sluggish. Did you take a nap to rejuvenate?

Did you take a brisk walk to get the blood flowing again? No, you probably went to the vending machine and bought yourself a soda and a candy bar, felt good for twenty minutes and then crashed again. Our bodies are demanding that we get some sleep, but instead of listening to them we just eat something to give it something to do. Remember, once the metabolism is slowed down, it is hard to get it back up.

The most recent research that has come to light the last few years has to do with hormones and sleep.

Too little sleep increases levels of an hormone called "ghrelin" (boosts appetite) and decreases levels of "leptin" (which suppresses appetite).

The result - sleeping to little or not sleeping well can actually fool your body to put on extra pounds!

An American study found that women that slept at least seven hours per night were on average slimmer than those that slept five hours.

The term "beauty sleep" comes to mind …

The study also indicated that light sleepers were more at risk of becoming obese than good sleepers.

Surprisingly enough eating habits, diet and sleeping patterns were equally important in predicting the risk of becoming overweight!

If you really want to get back on the track to a healthier weight, you need to sleep better in addition to eating better and exercise. In order to succede your body needs sufficient sleep, otherwise you won’t make it.

To find out how many hours per night you need to sleep is thus extremely important if you want to slim down and to stay slim!