The Butterfly Effect

Like me, you might have heard that fat cells don’t die. As nature’s cruel joke, all us dieters, exercisers, trying-to-look-gooders are cursed with keeping our fat cells once they are born in our body even after we lose weight, so as soon as we take a bite of the next slice of cake we dare to eat, the fat globules will promptly find their way to the nearest fat cell and fill it up to it’s well-rounded capacity. Despite its dark charm, I haven’t checked the validity of this claim (that’s a search engine rabbit hole for another time), but I am here to tell you of another one of nature’s cruel jokes that is research proven and The Biggest Loser-tested!

You see, once you gain weight and lose it, your own body conspires in many different ways to make you go back to your previous weight! Researchers from the U.S. Institute of Health followed 14 out of 16 participants from Season 8 of the popular show The Biggest Loser for six years and found out that the participants, who had lost an average of 58.3kg gained an average of 41 kg back! Four weighed more than they did before the show. Knowing how easily we put our weight back on once we get off a diet, this might not be shocking, but the research also made these two surprising observations:

1. The metabolic rate of the participants slowed down drastically (which means less calories are burned for the upkeep of the body’s natural functions) and remained slow even as they gained their weight back. What does that mean? Their bodies were burning less calories and therefore even if they were eating less, more of those calories were turning into fat than being burned.
2. The hormone leptin, one of the two major hormones responsible for energy balance and hence body weight, plummeted in these participants and did not bounce back to normal levels. Leptin suppresses hunger, and low levels of it mean… you got it- constant hunger and eventual weight gain.

Once the feelings of being letdown by my own physical body subsided (traitor!), I realised that all those years when I blamed my weight regain on my lack of will-power and attributed it as my own failure, I was fighting a sneaky, silent enemy- my own bodily functions. It also made me want to share this with others so we can stop fat shaming ourselves and others, and start looking at our weights with a new perspective.

So the first thing I would say to someone who has ever lost weight and regained it (it’s almost all of us, let’s admit) is that , Be kind and compassionate to yourself. It is not easy losing weight and it’s even harder keeping it off.