Regaining weight is not inevitable

Health-related websites lit up this week when a newly published study indicated that regaining weight after a diet is highly likely as a result of hormones that regulate appetite. The takeaway on many popular sites is that regaining the weight you’ve lost while dieting is “not your fault.”

Fault isn’t the issue, and overweight people don’t need to be guilted if they regain. I feel just as strongly that they don’t need to be discouraged.

What scares me is that people reading these articles may interpret the study results to mean “you can’t succeed, so why bother?” or “regain is inevitable.”

Let’s dig a little deeper into the science so we can understand what’s going on.

Appetite is regulated, in part, by the hormones leptin and ghrelin. Leptin inhibits appetite; ghrelin increases it. Dieting can cause a decrease in leptin production and an increase in ghrelin.

Your body’s not stupid. If it perceives that it’s being starved to death, it quite naturally wants you to eat more.

And that’s what the study was all about. One year after the dieters lost weight, the hormones (including leptin and ghrelin) that serve as “mediators of appetite” had not returned to normal, pre-dieting levels. So those dieters ended up hungrier than before and more likely to overeat.

But notice that a couple of paragraphs ago, I said dieting “can cause” and used the word starved. This is essential to understanding how to prevent weight regain.

The more restrictive a diet, the more likely it is to cause these negative reactions.

Also note that this new study involved what the authors say was a “very-low-energy diet.” That raises my eyebrows immediately. Unless your physician has put you on a severely restricted diet for medical reasons, I strongly advise you to stay away from any such plan. In medical parlance, a “very-low-energy diet” means consuming only 400 to 800 calories a day. That’s an extremely aggressive caloric deficit.

It’s hardly surprising that the bodies of the study participants responded as though they had been starving.

As I’ve written before, the fastest way to achieve permanent fat loss is the tortoise method: for most people, that’s one or two pounds a week. (People with quite a lot to lose will drop fat more quickly.)

One or two pounds a week might sound discouraging, and maybe you’re jaded from watching The Biggest Loser and seeing the immense weekly losses the contestants rack up. Remember that they’re training for four to six hours a day. Their numbers are not realistic for people with lives that include jobs and families. We also don’t know the contestants’ success in keeping their weight off.

But here’s what I want you to know: weight regain is absolutely not inevitable. I offer the following points to help you maintain fat loss permanently:

• If you don’t want to regain, don’t starve yourself in the first place. In my e-report on the zig-zag method for fat loss (you can get a free copy by signing up for my weekly e-mail newsletter, using the box at top right), I explain why a moderate reduction in calories is the smart way to go. You’re less hungry. You preserve muscle mass (your calorie-burning machine). You are much less likely to provoke the starvation response that gets your hormones out of whack.
• Maintaining your new, lower body weight requires a permanent change in lifestyle. You can never go back to overeating and under-exercising. That doesn’t mean you can never eat a chocolate bar or a slice of pizza—just that your calorie intake has to match your energy output.
• Exercise is your friend for life. Research by the scientists who created the National Weight Control Registry (consisting of successful “losers” who have kept the weight off) shows that 90 percent of them get at least an hour of exercise daily. Walking is the most popular choice. Other research backs this up as well.

Did you read about this study online? What did you think about the findings?

Flickr photo by Paul H

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