I lost 9lb in two weeks by making one simple tweak to my lifestyle. I didn’t use Mounjaro, diet or change how I exercise and I couldn’t believe the results… anyone can do it too

For me, losing weight has always been a journey beset by demons. A battle of will and calorie-counting concentration that I inevitably lose in the end. Having been put on my first diet aged 11 by my mother, I associate the whole process with misery, yo-yo-ing and failure.

Ten years ago, I vowed never to restrict food intake again and instead lost 4st through exercising five days a week. But in 2020 I injured both knees, the first one in a gym accident, the second in a cycling accident. Unsurprisingly, the weight crept back on.

For the past two years, I have been back to being fat – but stable. Happy enough with my size 18 curves that I would never consider injecting myself with weight-loss drugs, but always with half an eye out for ingenious ways to get a bit thinner without dieting.

So when I read about a Finnish sleep study, which concluded that disordered bedtimes and short nights’ sleep increase the likelihood of obesity and nearly double the risk of major cardiovascular events, I wondered if the reverse could then be true.

If I went to bed at the same time each night, tuning into my circadian rhythm – the body’s desire to sleep during the dark hours of the night and be active for the day span of the sun – and aiming for that mythical eight hours-plus of sleep a night, would the weight not pile on? In fact, would it even slide off?

Instead of sweating through agonising exercise, could I lose weight simply by lying down?

I announce to my husband Anthony – as well as our son Winston, 22, and his girlfriend Paris, also 22, who currently live with us – that I am going to be in bed by 9pm every night for two weeks as part of a scientific experiment.

This amuses them, as we are all night owls; we eat supper late, sometimes past 9.30pm, watch TV late, have late baths and potter about doing admin before falling into an exhausted sleep some time after midnight.

For it to be a fair experiment, I decide not to make other changes; I will eat, drink and exercise as usual, still go out with friends, still have that bath before bed. I will simply shift my routine earlier: supper at 7pm, bath by 8.30pm. I will, however, cut out the nightly doom-scrolling on my phone. Paris assures me cutting out blue light will help me fall asleep more easily.

The first night, getting supper on the table by 7pm is a sprint of chopping and speedy stir-frying. No time for crowding round the kitchen island before dinner, having what Winston calls a ‘cleansing ale’, snacking on salted nuts and comparing our days.

At dinner, there is no time for seconds or dessert either. I miss my usual after-dinner glass of wine and square of chocolate and instead dash upstairs to run my bath. I hop in for a five-minute splash and then, phew, jump into bed with my Kindle, heart thudding, at 9.01pm.

The street outside is still all hustle and bustle, I can hear my family downstairs, watching something loud and exciting on TV. One of our dogs wanders in and looks confused. She’s not the only one.

But I start reading and the next thing I know it is 1.30am and I am wide awake, Kindle dropped on the floor beside the bed, my bedside light having been turned off by my husband who is now fast asleep next to me. My body has clearly calculated that I’ve had my usual five hours, so it must be time to get up. This is not part of the plan; I have to sleep for that magic eight or nine hours if I am going to reap all those benefits.

Usually, I wake between 3am and 4am in a panic, frantically calculating the ever-shorter period of sleep time ahead of me before I have to get up at 7am. Hardly conducive to nodding off again.

This time, though, I’ve still got over five hours left until my alarm, so it doesn’t matter if I have a little wakeful time now. I relax and switch on my Kindle again. Within a few minutes I am asleep once more. The dawn wakes me about 6.30am. It’s only Day One and I’m already pervaded by a feeling of immense wellbeing. Or smugness. So, this is what being well-rested feels like.

One week in, I take stock. I’ve had to curtail my social life but I’ve become efficient at my evening routine and the family have fallen in with the 7pm suppertime with minimal grumbling. Surprisingly, I’m always conked out within half an hour of getting into bed at 9pm.

Under normal circumstances, my husband wakes me when he comes to bed, with his pre-bed routines and heavy settling into bed. This week, however, he tells me I’ve been so knocked out I haven’t turned a hair. I still wake between 1am and 2am some nights but I take a melatonin gummy (synthetic melatonin to promote sleep) and drift off again.

Miraculously, I actually sleep right through on two occasions, racking up nine or ten hours for the first time since childhood.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed hardly covers it; I feel a million dollars. And when I step on the scales, I am astounded to find I have lost 5½ lb (2.5 kg) over the course of seven days. The early-to-bed diet has worked! When I think about it, I can see how. Preparing supper so early means I don’t have time to snack on crisps and nuts beforehand; three hours’ less drinking in front of the telly has cut down on the fattening wine intake.

I do wake up starving, but the demands of dog walking and my gentle morning fitness routine mean I can hold off breakfasting until 10am. This means I achieve that Holy Grail of intermittent fasting for 14 hours with the minimum of effort.

They say the circadian rhythm regulates blood pressure and heart rate, hormone release, inflammation and the overnight repair of blood vessels and gut biome. Too little or badly-timed sleep is linked to the increase of ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and to the decrease in leptin, the satiety hormone, so increasing cravings for calorie-dense foods and sugar spikes. Aligning sleep with your circadian rhythm, however, is associated with better metabolic and hormonal health.

The popular theory that sleep before midnight is inherently better for you than sleep after is correct, too. It’s not some magic pumpkin-at-midnight striking of the clock; pre-midnight hours typically align with when the body is primed to sleep well.

This is because slow-wave sleep (SWS), the deepest and most physically restorative core stage of sleep, dominates the first half of the night. When going to sleep too late causes circadian misalignment, you compress or lose that SWS time altogether.

The more sleep you get earlier on, the more SWS time you get, leaving time for lots of lovely REM (rapid eye movement) sleep later on in the night, which is critical for memory consolidation and emotional processing.

In a nutshell, good SWS/REM sleep means less cortisol (the ‘stress’ hormone known to create the conditions for weight gain), which means a happier body with happier ways of dealing with calories. Throw in the benefits of intermittent fasting (and, as the Zoe Science & Nutrition podcast would have it, the metabolic miracle of what they call ‘fasting sleep’) and all my bushy-tailed perkiness is explained.

After just two weeks of 9pm bedtimes, I have lost a total of nearly 9lb (4kg) and gone from a size 18 to squeezing into that lucky pair of generously-sized 16 jeans. All without the usual hell of food noise, calorie-counting, self-hatred and despair. I’m less stiff and decrepit in the mornings because of the lowering of inflammation through better sleep, too; my skin is visibly dewier.

More importantly, going to bed early has made me feel a hundred times better about the body that I have. For two weeks, people have commented how fantastic I look: not just full of beans but confident, sexy, owning my curves. I didn’t just lie down and lose weight: I got my beauty sleep.

So, what now? My plan is to stick to the 9pm bedtimes three nights a week – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – and see if I can keep the weight off. If not, I’ll just have to dream up a lifestyle that can embrace both 9pm bedtimes and the chance to show off my new body confidence. Anyone for a day rave and an early-bird set menu?