Light at night makes you fat and causes diabetes 2

A new sleep study with mice showed that sleeping with just a tiny bit of dim light makes you fat. The mice in the study promptly put on 50% of their body weight and some of them developed pre-diabetes in only 8 weeks of time! These unfortunate mice were fed exactly the same as the control group that slept in the dark.

This happened to me as well: I worked graveyard shift for two years and was gaining weight like crazy and couldn't understand why! And after I finally quit my job and got a day-time job I found out I got diabetes 2! Obviously, it is very hard to keep the light out when sleeping during the day. If you must work graveyard shift, you should sleep in a basement without windows, like a laundry room. If you live in an apartment you might consider making a bed in a closet or bordering your window up with plywood. And you must never ever fall asleep in front of a tv. And try to find yourself a day-time job!

Being exposed to bright light before going to bed is bad too, another study shows. So in the evening you must dim all the lights and read a book, meditate or have sex; playing video games and watching tv is not recommended. A study on real people showed that if they were exposed to bright light in the evenings inhibited their melatonin production, raising their blood pressure and glucose levels, causing serious health risks. Invention of electricity was really bad for our health, I guess. Watching tv until late at night or sitting in front of a computer is super bad for you. Melatonin production is maximum at 2 am, and if you stay up until 2 or 3 am watching movies you are really screwing up your health big time. If you have a nightlight, move it from the bedroom to the bathroom, so that you won't be exposed to the bright light when brushing your teeth before bed or getting up at night to go to the bathroom.

If you are middle-aged, simply eliminating all the lights in your bedroom is not enough, since melatonin production drastically declines with age. The researchers say a young person has like 100 times more melatonin than a middle-aged person.

Doctors recommend 1 to 5mg of Melatonin daily. They suggest starting at a low dose, and gradually increasing it as needed, because some people had some side effects, such as feeling groggy in the morning or having disturbing vivid dreams. Frankly, I enjoy vivid dreams. And to avoid grogginess in the mornings make sure that the supplement you buy doesn't say on the bottle: "Time release formula", unless you are the type of a person who wakes up at 3am and can't go back to sleep. The optimum dose for Melatonin hasn't been determined. But the mice who were given Melatonin lived 20% longer!

According to researches, a lot of cheaper Melatonin supplements are of poor quality and contain a much less Melatonin than it says on the bottle. So it is better to buy Melatonin supplements from a reputable company and, perhaps, pay a bit more, because a low quality Melatonin supplement is not only useless, but can be harmful.