Congratulations — you’ve hit your
ideal body weight!
Now what?
Your new mission, should you choose
to accept: keeping that weight off. But the hard truth is that you might find yourself struggling with the
creeping menace of weight (re)gain.
Hitting your goal weight can be scary
(and kind of a letdown), depending on how long it’s taken you to get there. And
the chance of regaining the weight you
just lost is pretty high — around 80 percent, some research says.
But before you throw up your hands
and dive head-first into the nearest plate of cheese fries, just know that you
don’t have to be a statistic. To keep the weight off, it’s important to
understand how your body has changed and learn practical strategies to help you
maintain weight loss.
Why Maintaining an Ideal Body Weight
is a Balancing Act
“Energy balance” is a key concept to
understand if you want to lose weight and keep it off: What you consume through
food and beverages (energy in), must be balanced with the everyday needs of
your body to do things like breathing, moving, digesting, etc. (energy out).
So, if over time, you’re able to
match the calories coming in with the amount of energy your body needs, then
you won’t gain or lose much weight — and your waistline should stay about the
same size. But if you upset the balance and start taking more energy in than
you’re expending, you’ll most likely gain weight.
You don’t need to hit an exact
balance each and every day; you need to preserve the equilibrium in the
long-term.
But you should also be aware of other
factors that can be influential as well: “This balance is affected by a number
of factors besides just what we eat and how much we exercise,” says Jessica
Cording, M.S., R.D. “Age, sex, health conditions, and
medications are just a few examples of things that may impact that balance.”
How Your Brain Fights Weight
Loss
One of the reasons most people pack
on the pounds again is primarily due to a slow creep of calorie intake, either
conscious or not. “The brain fights back against weight loss,”
says Stephan J. Guyenet, Ph.D., a former obesity and neuroscience researcher
and author of The Hungry Brain.
“Body
fatness is actively regulated by non-conscious circuits in the brain —
particularly a brain region called the hypothalamus — and these circuits
evolved primarily to prevent weight loss,” says Guyenet.
Periods
of low calorie intake were a huge threat to survival and reproduction for our
ancestors, so evolution reworked our bodies to fight back any time our
energy-dense fat stores began to wane.
“This
‘starvation response’ ramps up hunger, increases our perception of the
seductiveness of food, and reduces calorie expenditure,” Guyenet explains. “It
primarily drives us to eat more, and it’s quite effective — it can undermine
our best intentions to maintain weight loss.”
How Weight Loss Changes Your Body
Research also shows that some of your
body’s functions — most notably your metabolism and hormones like leptin, the
“satiety hormone”— may be altered by the change in energy restriction
required to lose weight.
“The
key event that triggers the body’s ‘starvation response’ to weight loss is a
decline in circulating levels of the hormone leptin,” says Guyenet. “The brain
perceives this decline and initiates the starvation response. When researchers
prevent leptin from declining in weight-reduced people, the starvation response
doesn’t occur, showing that the decline in leptin is the key signal to the
brain that drives changes in appetite and metabolism.”
Levels
of leptin are also
affected by the amount of body fat you have: If you gain weight, leptin
increases, and if you lose fat, leptin drops, prompting an increase in
appetite.
A 2011
study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that even at one year after
weight loss, the amount of leptin wasn’t able to rebound to pre-weight loss levels, making
weight regain extremely likely.
Why Weight Loss Makes You Want to Eat
More
After weight loss, the drive to eat
ramps up, which almost always results in an increase in calorie intake.
“The
metabolic rate also slows after weight loss, for two reasons,” says Guyenet.
“First, you have less tissue mass, and therefore you need fewer calories to
maintain your body’s normal metabolic processes and to move around. Second, as
part of the ‘starvation response,’ you begin to burn fewer calories per unit
mass, especially during physical movements.”
To keep
your hunger in check, Guyenet suggests focusing on foods that are higher in
protein and fiber (more filling)
and lower in calorie density, getting enough sleep, managing stress,
and getting regular physical activity.
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