I'm Sarah. I'm a lawyer with three children. I exercise two or three times a week and I eat relatively healthily. On paper, I was doing things right.

But over five years the weight crept on. Never suddenly. Just slowly, through having kids and the growing pressure at work, until it was simply there.

So I did what everyone does. I tried diet after diet. Supplements. Calorie-counting apps. Exercise classes. Personal training sessions. At one point, a full fruit juice detox.

I was never able to shift it.

The hardest part was the hunger. Cravings through the day. Late snacking at night.

And I worked in the city, with every kind of food a short walk from my desk. Eating well felt like a fight I lost most days.

Then I went to see a sleep doctor, and he explained something no diet had ever mentioned.

Two hormones control your hunger. Ghrelin makes you feel hungry. Leptin tells you you're full. How much weight you put on is heavily linked to them.

And sleep is what keeps them in balance. He told me that if I really wanted to get to the bottom of my weight, I should look at how well I was sleeping.

A high-stress job. Three kids. I was going to bed stressed, with my cortisol still high.

I'd feel incredibly tired all day. Then I'd get into bed and lie awake. When I did fall asleep, I woke again and again through the night. My sleep was always in pieces.

I tracked it on my Whoop, and it showed exactly what I felt.

The science backs up what the doctor told me. In a University of Chicago trial, people followed the same calorie-controlled diet twice: once with 8.5 hours in bed, and once with 5.5.

They lost about the same weight both times. But on short sleep, they lost 55% less fat and 60% more lean mass, the muscle you want to keep. They felt hungrier too.

Same diet. Same calories. The only difference was sleep.

Some of my favourite creators kept saying how big an impact it had on their sleep quality. By then I knew sleep was my problem, so I tried it.

Two capsules before bed. No melatonin, nothing to knock you out. It's made to help your body switch off and reach deep sleep.

It took about a week before I truly noticed. The cravings were quieter, and I felt in control.

Better sleep gave me better discipline. For the first time I could actually stick to eating well.

I had more energy to exercise too. The classes I was doing stopped wiping me out for days at a time.

Nine kilos, after five years of never being able to shift it.

I didn't find a new diet. I fixed my sleep, and everything else finally started to work.

My husband kept mentioning it. Then my mum and my sister started asking questions. They thought I was on Ozempic.

I wasn't. I was sleeping.

Stop trying every fad that comes your way on social media. Look at the science.

Sleep is how our bodies have regulated hunger and weight for thousands of years. Give your body proper sleep, and it can do its job.

Sarah's story is one we hear a lot: years of blaming willpower, when the cause was the night.

I built Sleep & Recovery because I had the same problem. Stress that never switched off at bedtime, and broken sleep because of it.

No melatonin. No sedatives. Six ingredients, each at the dose the research used, to help your body switch off and reach deep sleep.