People often turn to exercising or dieting as ways to lose weight, but what some may not realize is getting enough sleep may be an effective way to shed the pounds, too.

A recent study published in the journal “Current Biology“ suggests the difference in a person’s internal clock and social clock, known as “social jet lag” can lead to weight gain. In the study, people who had the most differing sleep schedule from the week to the weekend were more likely to be overweight. One hour worth of social jet lag leads to a 33 percent increase in a person’s risk of becoming overweight.

A person’s internal clock — called the circadian clock — is set by day and night time. Our bodies want to be awake when it’s sunny and be asleep when it’s dark. This provides people with the optimal time for getting an adequate amount of sleep. But due to people’s busy schedules, people often ignore their internal clock.

“Our body clocks run differently because we don’t see the sun anymore because we work inside, and that makes our body clocks go later and later,” said the study’s leading author Till Roenneberg, in a video. When a person stays up while they should be sleeping, the body’s metabolism process doesn’t function normally, creating a lower resting metabolism rate and a higher body mass index.

“Because the difference in sleep timing between work and free days resembles the situation of traveling across several time zones to the west on Friday evenings and ‘flying’ back on Monday mornings, the phenomenon of regular, weekly changes in sleep timing was coined social jet lag,” Roenneberg said in the study.

For students, getting up for that 8 a.m. class, working a night shift, pulling a late night to finish that paper or just staying out late with friends all contributes to social jet lag. When people pull that all-nighter, they tend to load up on caffeine and eat unhealthy food.

U. Oregon freshman Katy Kachmarik knows several people who have gotten less than four hours of sleep and gained weight this year.

“I’d probably try to get more sleep because I know physically what it’s like to have jet lag,” Kachmarik said. “And I don’t like it.”

One-third of the 65,000 study participants suffered from two or more hours of social jet lag, while 69 percent of the people suffered from one hour. If a person times their day and sleep schedule to mesh more with their internal clock rather than their social clock, the study said, the amount of social jet lag a person suffers from will decrease. 

“Our data suggest that improving the correspondence between biological and social clocks will contribute to the management of obesity,” Roenneberg said.