How everyday habits can make you fat

You're a night owl
If you're routinely losing out on sleep, chances are, losing weight is more challenging for you. Sleep deprivation can increase your risk of obesity by boosting ghrelin (an appetite stimulating hormone) and lowering leptin (an appetite suppressor), says Ramona Josephson, a registered dietitian in Vancouver. One study from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom found that, compared to a healthy eight hours of shut-eye, each one-hour decrease in sleep duration was linked to almost three percent more body fat. Worse still, research by the University of California at Irvine suggests that people are more likely to binge-eat at night, in darkened rooms or restaurants and during the darker seasons of fall and winter. Take preventive measures by getting to bed earlier and eating meals in brighter light, so you're less likely to overindulge. Check out these 5 reasons to get your beauty sleep.

You eat at "healthy" restaurants
According to a study co-authored by Wansink last September, people tend to under estimate calories at so-called “healthy” restaurants -- and they're more likely to order high-calorie extras like sodas, chips or desserts there too. In fact, study participants ended up consuming 56 percent more calories at Subway than at McDonald's. So, don't get duped by healthy claims: ask for nutrition information everywhere you go, and if you have to guesstimate the calories, add up the individual components and double your total for a more accurate tally, says Wansink. (In his study, Subway diners estimated, on average, that a large meal was 646 calories -- less than half of the actual 1,327 calories it contained.)

You never weigh yourself
There's no need to be a slave to the scale, but a recent study from the University of Minnesota found that dieters who weighed themselves daily lost about 12 pounds over two years, while those who never did shed only four pounds. Other research, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that those who have daily weigh-ins (along with face-to-face support) are 82 percent less likely to regain five pounds than a control group without weigh-ins or support.

You're a stress junkie
We all know stress is bad for us -- but new research reveals that women are particularly prone to developing poor eating habits when they're under pressure. In an experiment led by Dr. Debra Zellner, a psychology professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, men and women were given sets of word jumbles in different difficulty levels (easy and hard) with bowls of grapes, chips, peanuts and M&Ms nearby. The women working on the most difficult puzzles were more likely to eat the M&Ms and reported feeling more stressed than women with the easier puzzles, who mostly ate grapes. Men showed opposite results: those working on the easy jumbles ate the most M&Ms and chips. The study demonstrates that among women, the trigger to scarf down unhealthy foods may be psychological, not bio logical. “It's called ‘disinhibition,'” says Zellner. “We think women choose chocolate when stressed because so many normally deprive themselves of high-fat and sugary foods.” So, even if it's counterintuitive, eating a few small treats each day -- whether it's salty pretzels or a scoop of cookie-dough ice cream -- may make these foods less “forbidden” and possibly less appealing, even when you're under the gun.

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