Neither rocket science nor brain surgery

I've known since I was about fifteen that a week on a diet will not suffice to lose the weight that you've spent years dedicatedly gaining. But I don't know how much older I'm going to have to get before the message sinks in that if you've got a sleep debt that has built up over several nights (or, of course, longer), one normal eight-hour sleep will not be enough to get you back out of the red. In my own case this has not been true since about 1978. And yet we live in hope.