Stay slim - stay asleep!

Oh, for the sleep of the innocent...

My hearfelt thanks go out to Dr Nathaniel Watson who has scientifically proved that staying in bed makes you slim.  Ok - what he actually said in the journal 'Sleep' this week, apparently,  was that sleeping for more than nine hours a night can actually encourage weight loss. Since I ended up in hospital  recently due to a  troublesome spine, I seem to have had at least nine hours sleep a night, along with another ten and a half during the day. (I blame the morphine patches myself.)  And yet, when I do eventually rise, I see the same curvy (it sounds better than fat) person looking back at me in the mirror.  I mean how many more hours a night/day sleep can a girl get?

Of course I realise that getting a  good night's sleep must keep us healthier, and I'm not even a doctor. But slimmer? Now that really is a new one. I suppose you could argue all this sleep stops people eating five Weight Watchers chocolate bars at 4 o'clock in the morning. But I'm getting a bit fed up with being told by experts what to, and what not to do, when surely we are all just different people with different needs? As it happens, I haven't had a sip of red wine for several months, but instead of feeling rather superior to my friends for my resistance to temptation, I read that a glass of red every day is good for the heart.
I've never enjoyed drinking water (especially the bottled type, but for years 'experts' have been saying we should drink litres of the stuff every day  to stay healthy.  Now we're told that any liquid form will do: tea, de-caf coffee, juice, lemonade etc....all of which I can drink happily and could have done without guilt if only someone had mentioned it before.

Back to the weight problem: at least, thanks to Dr Watson, we now know it's all down to the 'obesity genes.'  Personally, I call them my 'fat jeans.'  But that's another story altogether.