Why You Regained The Weight You Lost So Happily

I’m going to look for the original study on this but here are some numbers I’ve never seen before. From Rachel Zabrodski’s Beyond Dieting:

Set point theory also relates to issues of metabolism. If one’s metabolic rate is reduced to ensure survival, fewer calories are needed. The “set point” is lowered. Therefore, one will gain more weight when the diet stops ensuring a subsequent weight gain on fewer calories. This phenomena is often found in women who have endured a very low calorie liquid protein diet (VLCD) that consists of 500 calories per day. Weight is lost initially, stabilizes and when calories are increased to just 800 per day, weight is GAINED. It is believed that the set point is lowered and a resultant net gain occurs (College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, 1994).

There has been discussion that the process of prolonged and repeated dieting puts the body at physical risk. Yo-yo dieting or weight cycling is the repeated loss and regain of weight. Brownell, Greenwood, Stellar, and Shrager (1986) suggested that repeat dieting will result in increased food efficiency that makes weight loss harder and weight regain easier. The National Task Force on the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity (1994) concluded that the long term health effects of weight cycling were largely inconclusive. It recommended that the obese should continue to be encouraged to lose weight and that there were considerable health benefits in remaining at a stable weight. This is an ironic suggestion in that most dieters do not intentionally try to regain weight once it has been lost

Nowhere in the happy “diet and exercise” mythology is there room for discussion of people gaining weight consuming 800 calories a day. All of us burn that many calories a day easily – that is, under normal metabolic conditions. But that’s the problem those of us who wrestle with obesity face, we don’t metabolize food normally.

I’ve lived on 700 calories a day for months on end. It’s horrible. You just look at piece of protein and you feel guilty because all of it is too high calorie for satisfaction. Big plates of plain vegetables, tuna in water, a bowl of shredded wheat with a little fruit (careful there) and maybe a piece of bread or two. Croutons become a luxury. Don’t get carried away with that chicken breast – you can only have four ounces of that. A piece of birthday cake becomes a crisis. If you’re hypoglycemic, you may have a headache the entire time as well. I did. And you are never, ever full. You are hungry 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s one of the reasons this quote from Dr. Jeff Friedman in RETHINKING THIN meant so much to me:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”

I was going to close with that, but I do want to include another potent paragraph about set points:

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.

The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks

And those set points can be eliminated with weight loss surgery – that’s why it works so much better than diet and exercise.