Your body flips between “fed” and “fasted” states every day, storing fat from the food you eat and then burning it once there’s nothing left to use from the meals. Here’s a simple graph that depicts this cycle: The lighter portions are the periods where your body has excess energy because you ate. The darker portions are the periods when the body has no energy left from food and thus has to burn fat to stay alive. As you can see, we burn quite a bit of fat when we sleep. If the lighter and darker portions balance out every day—if you store just as much fat as you burn—your weight stays the
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