Overweight/obesity and concurrent disorders, symptoms, behaviour, and body temperature

Overweight/obesity tends to co-occur with disturbed sleep and disordered eating (e.g. binge-eating, night-eating), although the precise mechanism/s underpinning the relationships is unclear. However, overweight/obese people are more likely to eat late at night than normal-weight people, thus, late night-eating (or binge-eating, which often occurs at night) may at least partly explain the observed relationship between overweight/obesity and impaired sleep in affected individuals. For example, night-eating and binge-eating are related to impaired sleep (e.g. longer sleep onset latency) and weight gain in obese people, and clinically, obese people are at an increased risk of a binge eating disorder and/or night eating syndrome diagnosis. A similar profile of sleep deficits is evident in overweight/obese people, binge-eaters, and night-eaters, and impaired sleep (e.g. longer sleep onset latency, shorter sleep duration) is associated with overweight/obesity, night-eating, and binge-eating. Thus, it is possible that the sleep problems experienced by overweight/obese people are at least in part due to the indirect effects of late night-eating and/or binge-eating on sleep, although it is less clear exactly how this might occur. Several psychological and biological mechanisms are examined as potential explanations of the relationship between disordered eating, overweight/obesity, and impaired sleep, including an elevated nocturnal body temperature.