It's incrediblenews for anyone whose idealweekend activity involves staying in bed 24/7 because a team of scientists have come to the conclusion that getting a bit of a extra shut-eye has a whole heap of hidden health benefits that we'd never even considered.

Even though most people (parents, usually) are convinced that surfacing at 11am on a Sunday morning must be terrible for your general health and wellbeing, the reality is that snoozing through breakfast can help you shed major pounds without even breaking into a sweat.

Ina studyrecently published in the journalSleep, researchers in South Korea analysed the sleep habits of2,156 adults in conjunction with their individual body mass indexes (BMI). The results indicate that "making up for lost sleep" on a weekend is the way to go if you're still harbouring that long lost pipe-dream of squeezing into last Summer's shorts.

The research discovered that people who didn't get enough sleep during the week but slept in on the weekends had alower BMI - averaging at 22.8 -that those who didn't bother making up for lost time on the weekend. The latter scored 23.1, which means the discrepancy between the two is at least fairly significant.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly why those extra hours of sleep result in a 0.12 difference, but researchers have pointed out that the TOTAL amount of sleep throughout a week can have a drastic influence on metabolism, hormones, and a whole heap of inner bodily functions. Yup. Science.

While this is all great news for weekend sloths, the people at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine still maintain that the most effective way to reap the rewards of a good night's kip is to go to bed at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning.

Ideally, we should all be aiming for a full sevenhours sleep each night to be at our physical and mental peak. But for now, feel free to grab those extra hours of snooze-time wherever you can find them.