In most overweight people, the body tries to prevent permanent weight loss.
This means that your body is actually working against you to lose weight.
That's because your weight is controlled by complex interactions between hormones and neurons in your hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that controls thirst, hunger, and body temperature . These hormones and neurons influence your appetite and the amount of food you eat.
Leptin and Weight Loss
Many overweight people have developed a resistance to a hormone called leptin.
Fat cells in your body produce leptin, and this tells your body when you have enough fat stores, which decreases your appetite.
WHAT IF I WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT ON MY OWN?
Some people can lose weight easily on their own by following a simple diet and exercise.
But many popular weight loss techniques don't work. Cleanses, fad diets, and crash diets don't help most people lose weight in the long term.
In fact, most people regain 30 to 35% of the weight they lost after a year.
If you have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight, or if you have lost weight but gained it back, you may benefit from a comprehensive weight management program.
Our program takes a holistic approach to weight loss by examining:
- what you eat,
- the amount of exercise you do,
- how you handle stress, and
- the influence of your medical history on your weight loss.
Why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off?
5 Reasons Why It's So Hard Not to Gain Weight
If you've ever tried to lose weight and found that the pounds didn't come off easily - or they came right back - you're not alone.
The fact is that when we lose weight, we trigger mechanisms that make it difficult to maintain the lost weight.
Some factors are within our control, but many are not. Understanding how this works could help you take a more compassionate look at your body.
We're not going to tell you how to lose weight, or even if you should.
But we're going to give you five facts about biology.
1. Metabolism slows down when you lose weight.
Metabolism is the process by which your body turns the food you eat into energy.
Metabolism varies from person to person. Scientists don't know everything about why this is.
But they know that some of this variation has to do with your body's composition of fat and muscle.
It also varies by gender - men have a faster metabolism because they have more muscle in their bodies - and it slows down with age.
But for everyone, metabolic energy burning occurs in three main ways:
Resting metabolism is the energy used to run your organs and, basically, to stay alive.
It accounts for between 50 and 70% of the total calories you burn.
The thermic effect of food - the energy used to digest what you eat and convert it into energy, about 10% of the calories you burn.
Physical activity, which accounts for about 30% of calories burned.
Voluntary physical exercise (such as gym) usually accounts for a very small portion of this energy expenditure. This is mostly energy used to move around.
When you lose weight, your metabolism slows down, partly due to simple physical effects.
“Calorie burning is somewhat proportional to your body weight.”
"So the heavier you are, the more calories it costs to move and the more calories it costs to, sort of, keep that body at rest."
2. If you choose to try to lose weight, make changes that you can live with in the long term.
In other words, make changes that you really enjoy, because you'll need to stick with them to keep the weight off.
This is because weight loss triggers biological mechanisms that make it more difficult to maintain the lost weight, including a slowdown in metabolism.
Metabolism seems to act like a spring: The more you try to lose weight, the more you can stretch that spring, i.e. lose weight.
But if you release the tension on the spring - by stopping the eating and exercise habits that helped you lose weight - your metabolism will kick back into gear and you will regain the weight you lost.
“Your body is constantly defending itself and trying to make you gain back the weight you lost.”
This means that any changes you make to your diet or exercise must be maintained continuously to avoid regaining weight.
3. Hormones in your brain conspire to make you hungrier when you lose weight.
Here's another devilish change that happens when you lose weight: Your hormones change in a way that alters your appetite.
Although many different hormones are involved in hunger, one of them is leptin, which is released by fat cells and tells the brain when to eat and when to stop eating.
When you lose weight, your leptin levels drop, and when that happens, "it's like a starvation signal," people "seem to want to eat even more than before to quickly recover their weight loss."
So, pause: You're not a glutton, and your hunger is not a moral failing. It's just hormones.
4. To lose weight, what you eat is more important than how much you exercise.
For most people, exercise is a minor part of weight loss.
The fact is, it's a lot easier to cut 600 calories by depriving yourself of a Starbucks muffin than it is to burn them off by running for an hour or more.
Additionally, people tend to use exercise as an excuse to indulge in more eating.
In this case, they tend to eat more calories as a "reward" than they burned at the gym.
Or they compensate by collapsing on the couch and moving less the rest of the day.
But that shouldn't be a reason not to exercise. Just don't do it to "win" a piece of chocolate cake.
Exercise has many documented benefits that have nothing to do with weight loss, including improved mood, better sleep, reduced anxiety, and improved blood sugar levels.
Additionally, some data suggests that if you do a lot of physical activity, your resting metabolism may slow down to compensate, although this remains a theory.
Evidence for this theory comes from a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania called the Hadza.
5. On the other hand, physical exercise appears to play an important role in maintaining a lower weight.
The first thing these people have in common: They report exercising every day for about an hour on average.
But that doesn't have to mean grueling workouts. The most popular form of exercise in this group is walking.
Those people who maintain their weight long-term also do a lot of resistance training and other activities.
"So it's not any particular activity that is associated with success," "I think, more than anything, it's the volume of activity."
One reason exercise appears to be a key to maintaining weight loss is that it helps counteract some of those biological mechanisms that kick in when you lose weight: decreased metabolism and increased hunger.
The difference between what you want to eat and the number of calories you burn creates an energy deficit.
"You have to make up for that energy gap either by exercising a lot more or by eating a little less, forever."
Many people think that to lose weight in the long term, they must always eat less.
Even people on the National Weight Control Registry seem to think so—they report eating an average of about 1,400 calories a day. But a recent study shows that's not necessarily true.
The reason they could eat this way and not gain weight despite having a slower resting metabolism?
They were now doing significantly more exercise than when they were heavier. They were doing the equivalent of about 40 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise.
These included short exercise sessions, such as 10-minute walks, and longer sessions.
So what to do with all this knowledge?
Knowing how this biology works might make you decide that the stress of losing weight isn't worth it, given all the obstacles.
And we don't know everything about why some people are successful at losing weight while so many others are not.
You may also decide to try to lose weight anyway. In this case, consider rethinking your ultimate goal.
Instead of trying to look like a magazine model, focus on making changes that will make you feel healthier.
“The changes you make then become rewards in their own right.”
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