It’s often said that 95% of weight loss strategies don’t work. It’s just not true. With advances in behavioral therapies for obesity (such as cognitive-behavioral therapy) and weight loss drugs, there are now many approaches to help people lose weight.
In fact, losing weight is the easy part (relatively speaking). The problem is that whenever you stop dieting or stop taking weight loss drugs, the weight always comes back.
Just to be clear, this does not mean that diets and other obesity treatments are useless. Far from it.
In a recent study published in lancet public healthresearchers checked in five years after participants had participated in either the 12-week or 52-week WW program (previously called Weight Watchers).
On average, people regained their weight little by little, but an average weight loss of about 2 kilograms was maintained for up to 5 years.
Even this short-term weight loss can significantly reduce your lifetime risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and other weight-related conditions. However, for obese people and their healthcare providers, weight regain can be demoralizing.
The stigma surrounding obesity, which sees a person’s weight as their responsibility, means that this treatment “failure” is often perceived as a personal failure. Not true. So why is the weight coming back on?
Your Brain Doesn’t Want You To Lose Weight
There are several reasons why the weight is coming back. First, our brains hate weight loss. We believe this is reducing our chances of survival, so we will do everything in our power to put the weight back on.
As you lose weight, your brain slows down your metabolic rate (the rate at which your body burns calories), subtly increasing efficiency. In reality, if she has two people of the same weight, one who is stable in weight and one who has just lost weight, the latter is the amount to eat to maintain the same weight. should be reduced.
It is known that leptin, a hormone secreted from fat, plays a major role in this. One of leptin’s key roles is to tell the brain how much fat you have. The more fat you have, the more leptin is produced. So when you lose weight, your brain senses a corresponding drop in leptin.
Interestingly, scientists show that administering enough leptin to trick the brain into thinking it hasn’t lost weight mitigates many of these weight loss-related changes. There is no cure yet based on these findings, but keep an eye on this space.
As well as these biological causes, each obese person has a unique combination of psychological, social, environmental, and economic factors that contribute to weight gain. Most of them are not resolved during weight loss therapy.
Obese people who lose weight still live in an environment where energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods are widely available, well-publicized, cheap and convenient. Social activities often center around food. We celebrate with food, we empathize with food, and we use food as both comfort and reward. Eating less requires constant thought and considerable effort.
Behavioral therapies for obesity, such as commercial group programs and cognitive-behavioral therapy, can teach strategies to help manage it, but they cannot stop obesity. Nor can it make our lives easier.
Everyday stressors and life events can disrupt the healthy habits and routines people establish when trying to lose weight, while drugs that target biological factors Surgery also works to address biological factors, but biology fights back.
chronic treatment
It is unrealistic to expect a one-time intervention to lead to permanent weight loss. there are no people It will simply come back again. The same goes for weight loss treatments.
Obesity is probably best thought of as a chronic, relapsing disease. Obese people need lifelong access to treatment and support. Rather than denying effective treatment options just because weight is regained, people need to be honest about what treatment can achieve and the potential need for ongoing support. After all, chronic diseases require chronic treatment.
A common view in society is that obesity is a simple problem. Therefore, obese people are “ashamed to be fat” and need to lose weight. They are fighting both biology and the environment. Obesity is not an option.
Amy Ahern, Principal Investigator, MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge and Giles Yeo, Professor of Molecular Neuroendocrinology, MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge University
This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Please read the original article.
