I love watching weightloss challenges, so I watch people go through these crazy transformations but often times after I hear that the participants will gain a significant portion, if not all, of the weight back. Why is that? Is it diet? Biology?
In: Biology
I read somewhere that the fat cells created when you gain wait never go away they only shrink. I dont know shit about it though, just something i read on the internet.
Keeping weight off is a change in life style. And people dont maintain that lifestyle change.
1. If you’re overweight and steady at some weight, that means your body is in equilibrium.
2. You make an effort to lose weight. This means you exercise more, eat better stuff, eat less of bad stuff, sleep more, drink more water, whatever. This is a change in your lifestyle.
3. You get to your target weight. So you think, maybe I dont need to eat as healthy or workout as much. So you dont, and eventually your body goes back to equilibrium which might mean you gaining weight again.
I was in treatment for an ED and this is a paraphrased version of how it was explained to me.
Bodies tend to have a set point, and will try to revert back to that point. It’s called weight cycling, and it’s worse for your health and heart than staying fat. Diets fail people because they aren’t sustainable lifestyle habits, and most diets can be considered disordered eating, precursor to a full blown eating disorder.
If you weigh your food, restrict food groups and religiously count calories, you are on track for an eating disorder.
When one diets, they generally keep a calorie deficit, which means they aren’t giving their bodies the calories it needs to function properly. The body treats this situation like a famine, and will try to store fat, which is why it’s difficult to lose weight to begin with. Once the weight comes off and a person reverts to a more sustainable moderately healthy/active lifestyle, the weight comes back on because it doesn’t understand the “famine” is over, and it wants to stockpile for the next starvation period.
So long as you’re eating a variety of foods that make you feel nourished, get enough hydration, rest, and move your body in ways that feel good, your weight really doesn’t matter that much because you’re still reaping the health benefits while not losing your mind and obsessing about food all day.
We’re all going to die anyway, and nobody is going to remember you for being thin or being so strong by resisting cake at celebrations. We’re here for a good time, not a long time.
Because they diet to lose weight. They see it as a process that ends when they get to the goal weight. They would not even need to diet if they adjusted their life style to eat only healthy choices. It would take a long time to see the results they can get from a diet, but the weight would stay off.
They did a study on Biggest Loser participants and found that their metabolisms were slowed down, presumably from the extreme diet. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/
There have been similar studies of fat people who have lost a lot of weight. They’re not the same as someone who was always at that lower weight. Their body is fighting to gain weight and keeps them constantly feeling very hungry and tired until they gain back all of the weight they lost.
There was a great article in the New York Times from 2012 called A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity that held some interesting bits. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but it’s been summed up nicely on [another site](https://mcn.com/2012/06/28/a-mathematical-challenge-to-obesity/).
I don’t think it’s confirmation bias when I say that the main bullet points make sense to me. The idea that a body has a state of equilibrium and must stay in that state for roughly 3 years before weight change is steady, makes perfect sense in retrospect. We’ve all had years where our weight goes up and down, usually around 5 lbs. in either direction, and the theories mentioned in that article just start to coalesce.
The most disturbing quote for me was this part: “The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.”
On one of those weight loss shows the participants have a trainer trainer and dietitian monitoring their progress and carefully prescribing their diet and exercise. All that change is external, applied to the participant.
Once the show is over, they leave. The participant is left to their own devices, and nobody will tell them otherwise. Often, they go back to whatever they were doing before the show, which is usually why they were overweight in the first place.
The only way to prevent that from happening is for the participant to change their lifestyle on their own and internalize whatever they learned, and continue to act as they were on the show without the trainer or dietitian guiding them. It has to be an internal change they chose for themselves.
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