The start of the school year that teachers refer to as "the honeymoon" ends for many students with Daylight Savings Time. For teens especially, getting up one hour earlier than normal on a Monday and trudging to school in darkness increases the odds that a late-August novelty morphs into an early-November drudgery.

While teachers need to be attuned to the this probable change of view and act accordingly, parents and students also need to. One of the best ways for parents and students to prolong the honeymoon feeling and keep a teen healthy is to make getting sufficient sleep a priority.What's sufficient to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics might strike you as impractical or even impossible, however. Both groups call for those between the ages of 13 and 18 to get between eight and 10 hours of sleep every 24 hours.Except for those teens being cyberschooled, that means - at the latest - falling asleep by 10:30.Before you say, "That just isn't happening," consider this: despite a concerted effort by parents, schools, and the medical community to combat teenage obesity, no real inroads have been made. The unsettling increase that occurred from 1999 to 2014 has flatlined since then, but the flatline now serves as an unacceptable fat line.According to figures cited in 2016 online issue of Obesity, in 2014 more than one in four children between the ages of 2 and 19 were not -repeat not - overweight but even fatter than that.They were fat enough to fall into one of the three classifications of obesity according to the Body Mass Index.Coincidentally, a 2014 study published in Physiology & Behavior clearly linked insufficient sleep with not only an increase in caloric consumption but also an increase in body weight. While you may reason that being awake for a longer period of time each day would require more calories, mitigating factors make that point moot. The lack of sleep increases the production of certain hormones, making you feel hungry and desirous for those high-calorie comfort foods you seek when in distress.Just missing one hour of normal sleep for three nights, in fact, produces a surge in the hormone ghrelin, an appetite stimulant, as well as a decrease in the production of leptin, a hormone that is an appetite inhibitor. Conversely, those who are well-rested secrete more growth hormone, also known as HGH, a substance that athletes sometimes take illegally because it enhances a performance enhancer and also reduces recovery time from injury.A study cited in the aforementioned P&B article found that while five days of insufficient rest lead to a 5 percent increase in caloric expenditure, it also lead to 42 percent more calories being consumed, the majority of which were consumed after dinner. Unchecked after-dinner eating usually leads to unwanted weight gain.Moreover, in specific research done with teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17, insufficient sleep increased the appeal of sweet, high calorie foods.Naturally, most who feel sleep deprived tend to either exercise less or exercise with less intensity. And those hardcore exercisers who fight through the fatigue and work out really hard, ironically enough, increase their chance of sickness or injury.Now if you're a parent or a teen who believes that sufficient sleep throughout school week is crucial to health and school success yet still can't see a way to reach it, there is a saving grace: weekends.In columns' past, I have stressed the need for keeping your sleep pattern the same all week. For optimal health, if you go to bed by 10 on a weeknight, bedtime should be no later than 11 on weekends. And you should rise at the same time every morning.But related research done to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes has found that insufficient sleep during the work week or school week can be mitigated by extra sleep on the weekends. While this study simply added sleep time and allowed for a later rise, my experience suggests a nap just before supper on Saturday and Sunday would work just as well while keeping your wake-up time the same - which is the key to keeping Monday mornings from being such a mental and physical drag.Read next week's column for more research and insight into another problem facing most children - even those not in the school system. Consuming far too much sugar.