Regaining Fat After Dieting

95% of people who lose weight will regain all, if not more of the weight they initially lost through dieting, within three years.

That is an insane failure rate.

Most studies will look at short term weight loss over 6-8 weeks on specific diets, for some people that sounds like a long time, but a successful fat loss programme should last your entire life. If it phases out over three years, all of the metabolic, physical, psychological and aesthetic benefits are gone too.

Why is the failure rate so high?

The majority of weight-loss strategies are unsustainable over a long period. The more we go through a lose/gain process, the more difficult it is to lose weight during the following weight loss programme. 

This is generally referred to as yoyo dieting, as there is a period of weight loss, followed by a period of weight gain, and repeated. There are several issues with this, but the primary one would have to be a metabolic adaption to sustained calorie deficits.

As we lose fat, or more worryingly, lean muscle tissue, our energy output overall decreases, as well as demand. Our bodies adapt to the amount of energy we take in by diminishing output in various ways, decreasing the want to move/exercise, minimizing normal movements we do throughout the day and physiologically adapting to the lowered calorie intake.

This new baseline remains the same, or a very slight increase, once someone starts to gain weight, meaning they gain the weight back even more quickly, and lose the weight increasingly slower over time as the process is repeated. If you can maintain that deficit for a longer period and then transition to maintaining, you’ll be fine, but for the majority of people who opt for short term strategies that focus solely on rapid weight loss, this will lead to a rebound.

Human survival over the past 200,000 years was largely down to our superior brainpower and intelligence, but also the incredible adaptability of our bodies to all sorts of environments.

Being able to store a lot of fat in times where food wasn’t as abundant, like travelling from country to country, or during famines, allowed specific groups of people to survive, where those who were less adapted to storing fuel would more than likely have died out. However, we are also very efficient at using this stored fat as fuel, when we need to.

This mostly comes down to the environment, and in most developed countries there is no shortage of food, on top of a lack of shortage (which is good), modern food is manufactured to have more calories, whether its through an increased amount of sugar or fats, or both, food today is more calorie-dense than anything that exists naturally. Its easier to obtain, digest, and packs a lot of energy. For a species adapted to storing fat when food is abundant, or artificially abundant in energy, this isn’t so good.

As redundant as it is to say, the majority of people will lose weight by modifying their diet as well as their behaviour to include mostly fresh whole foods and eliminating the majority of processed foods from their diet. That’s not to say you can only eat fruit/veg/meat, but if you’re struggling with bodyweight, finding a sustainable diet that is satiating, low in calorie density and enjoyable is going to be the key for sustained weight loss. Being hungry makes weight loss more difficult, so food volume plays an important role in avoiding hunger.

Overly restrictive diets lead to binge eating because they don’t account for the fact that we don’t want to be hungry all the time to lose weight, as from a survival point of view that’s a bad situation and there are blatantly high-calorie foods available whether it was life-threatening or not, the more primitive and survival-based instincts everyone has are still present today, making fighting instincts such as hunger a no go when it comes to dieting.

That being said, some diets use restricted eating, and they can be highly effective. However, as a sustainable dieting method, there is a strong argument against using such dieting tactics. They will work in the short term, but eating within 6-8 hours every day for the next 20+ years probably doesn’t call out to many people.

There is no one primary factor to why our society is getting larger and larger, a lot of research will look into specific macronutrients like carbs, fats and their various forms in foods, such as added sugar as sucrose or fructose, saturated and unsaturated fats. High carb/low-fat diets, high fat/low carb diets.

However, while these studies are taking a narrow view, as science is required to do, the overall picture is much wider than just diet. It’s been shown over and over that to lose weight, or fat, we need to be in a Calorie Deficit, getting there, sustaining that deficit and then maintaining that goal or healthy weight is a lot bigger than just calories or diet and requires an entire lifestyle change depending on how much weight needs to be lost.

Human behaviour, social behaviour, habits, mindset, our environments (country/town/work/home/family etc), psychology, physiology, endocrinology, specific diet, individual difference, exercise, general activity, and more. These all play a hand in determining body weight, our health and usually our diets.