can you point to examples of otherwise healthy individuals under moderate to high calorie restriction that gain weight due to chronic poor quality sleep?

it's not something I have ever been made aware of, and I don't understand how it could be the case.

What is mentioned in a couple of these comments about your body's response to external stressors changing how it allocates calories is absolutely true, but it's at the margins. If you're at maintenance caloric intake and ± a couple hundred calories a day, over years this can have an effect. But it's not going to meaningfully impact a 500-1000 calorie/day deficit to the point where you're still gaining weight.

I believe there is a study where people ate at a 25% deficit but had high glucose and still gained weight.

Is this the study you were referring to?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7898726/

> Effects of moderate sleep restriction during 8-week calorie restriction on lipoprotein particles and glucose metabolism

Because the conclusion starts with,

> In this study, 8 weeks of calorie restriction with and without sleep restriction of less than 90 minutes per day on 5 days with 2 days of ad libitum sleep per week, resulted in similar degrees of weight loss

Let me be clear that sleep deprivation doesn’t seem to be good for your circulating lipoprotien levels or insulin sensitivity based on that study, but they didn’t gain weight.

A lot of things about your body changes when you're extremely tired.

I don't have anything specific to link - it's just my own personal experience and what the doctor said.

In my own case, I had to eat much more than I theoretically should because my body wasn't able to process the food as well as it should (less than 50% of usual efficiency). And yet I was fat - not obese, but definitely not thin. The body redirected some of my food to storage even though I didn't have enough energy (glucose etc) as measured by blood screening. And it didn't use the reserves properly when I stopped eating.

Not gonna try to find a specific example, but just from having listened so much to the Stronger by Science and Iron Culture podcasts for the past few years, there have at least been numerous studies and metas over the last decade examining the effects of sleep on weight loss and weight gain as it pertains to bodybuilding goals. I don't recall any having showed an impact on the rate of gain or loss but duration of sleep opportunity definitely has an impact on the quality of gain or loss. That is, you lose more muscle and less fat losing weight while sleeping poorly, and gain more fat and less muscle when gaining weight while sleeping poorly.

By this logic, one could run an army legion without food supplies simply by keeping them sleep deprived.

Uh, no? The whole point is that the entire system breaks down. So you get sleep deprived humans who can't process food properly and have no energy as a result. Sounds like a big failure.