Season Four- Episode Fifteen

Hormones, not lack of willpower, may explain why four out of five people who lose weight gain it all back within a few years. A new study has found that even a year after dieters lose weight; their bodies are still sending them strong and often irresistible hormone signals to eat more. Australian researchers put a group of 50 overweight adults on a strict, 10-week diet that cause them to lose an average of 12 percent of their body weight. When they tested the subjects a year later, they found  that levels of hormones like leptin, which keeps appetite in check, and ghrelin, a hunger stimulant, had changed dramatically, slowing their metabolism and intensifying feelings of hunger. Their bodies had been programmed to keep weight at a higher “set point”, and were fighting to gain back the lost pounds. As a result, the volunteers gained back an average an average of half the weight they had lost, despite sticking to careful meal plans designed to keep it off. “What is impressive is that these [hormonal] changes don’t go away,” Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, tells The New York Times. By dieting, he says, “you are putting your body into a circumstance it will resist”

Courtesy of: The Week- November 18th