eli5: why is gaining weight so easy but losing weight so hard
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The biggest difference is time. If you’re 30 years old and 80 pounds overweight, it probably took you a decade to put on those 80 pounds, and you are trying to remove them in 1-2 years.
Your body wants to store as much as it can in case there’s a time when meals aren’t steady. That means storing as much as it can and limit usage as much as it can. It would rather make you feel hungry than use the energy it already stored.
ELI5 generalisation: your body has two fuel options, fat and carbs. Your body prefers to burn carbs, but excess is stored as fat. So your body makes you feel hungry for carbs instead of bothering to burn the fat, and so without careful management, the fat stores only grow.
People slowly gain weight over time just as they slowly loose weight over time.
You don’t notice either is happening until one day , you do.
I think because people are impatient when trying to lose weight and want results immediately, it can feel like it’s harder .
It isn’t easy for everyone to gain weight. I spent most of my life just trying to maintain mine by focusing on high calorie meals.
It’s not always that way. Some people fluctuate easily. Others have a hard time moving from their base rate. Some struggle to out on weight, others struggle to lose weight.
your body is always trying to keep you alive, lose weight by caloric deficit put you closer to death, so your biology works hard to avoid that
Not for everybody. Some people find it hard to gain weight.
Think like this. Its fun to eat and we live in a society that provides us all the high cal meals we want. Much more then we need.
To lose weight you need to abstain from that fun to a point of temporary discomfort (cal deficit)
Which option sounds more appealing for the short run ? Fun or no fun ?
Its mostly easy to lose weight when you find the dedication to do so
Getting out of your consistent body state is hard, it’s not easier for a thin person to magically gain weight than a large person to lose weight. They will both return to their mean unless a consistent new norm is established.
Our body evolved to gain weight, it didn’t evolve to lose weight. We now live in a time where food is vastly more abundant than we evolved for.
So we eat way more than we need, along with the types of foods we eat. Way more carbs and sugar than would have ever been naturally available to us. And like I said before, we evolved to store as much of that energy as possible, so we wouldnt die, when we couldn’t find food.
I went into a ketosis for a month in February. Maybe some new medication?
I was miserable, until I noted…a flat, boardlike stomach…a creature of history…mine!!! Called my doc with my cool diagnosis. He goes ” Eh, well you’re better now”….
This is why the keto diet is an LA staple(😶), I found out later. What I had was the “keto flu”, not my friendly cancer back again. A very difficult to follow diet, but damn…I got my midriff back. Now I know why the Hollywood stars follow this diet.
I’m not a diet-friendly person, but I liked my “intermittent diet” i.e. too lazy to cook-mango milkshake- crazy sweet- three times a day…yummy diet. There was not much body fat change with that. Just looked up the long list of celebs who are devotees of keto. Amazing.
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