Sleep is the best medicine: assessing sleep, disordered eating, and weight-related functioning

Sleep quality is linked to disordered eating, obesity, depression, and weight-related functioning. Most research, however, has focused on clinical populations. The current study investigated relationships between sleep quality, disordered eating, and patterns of functioning in a community sample to better understand relationships among modifiable health behaviors. Participants (N = 648) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk completed assessments of eating, depression, weight-related functioning, and sleep. Self-reported height and weight were used to calculate body mass index (M = 27.3, SD = 6.9). Participants were on average 37.6 years (SD = 12.3), primarily female (65.4%), and White, not Hispanic (72.7%). Over half of participants endorsed poor sleep quality, and average sleep scores were above the clinical cutoff for poor sleep quality. Sleep scores were significantly positively correlated with disordered eating, depression, and weight-related functioning, even after adjusting for age, body mass index, and sex. Multivariate regression models predicting weight-related functioning and depression showed that both sleep quality and disordered eating independently predicted depression. Sleep quality did not independently predict weight-related functioning; however, disordered eating did. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess sleep behaviors, disordered eating, and weight-related functioning in a community sample of weight diverse participants. Results indicate that most participants endorsed poor sleep quality, which was associated with disordered eating patterns, including binge eating and poorer weight-related functioning, even after controlling for body mass index, highlighting that this relationship exists across the weight spectrum. These results speak to the importance of health behavior assessment and intervention within nonclinical samples.Level of evidence Level III: evidence obtained from well-designed cohort or case-control analytic studies.