Everybody knows that losing weight and keeping it off is difficult. Research shows you can get the weight off permanently. But there’s a price you may have to pay.
According to a report by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, if you have been heavy enough to be considered obese and you are successful in losing a lot of weight, you will have to be vigilant about controlling your diet and exercise for the rest of your life.
Your situation is similar to remission from addiction. Without continually curtailing your food consumption, you will be in danger of gaining your weight back.
The researchers point out that when people with obesity lose weight, it usually only stays off for a matter of months. Up to 95 percent of these folks eventually get the weight back. One possible reason: Reducing calorie consumption sets off physiological processes in the body that lead people to eat high-calorie foods and put on pounds. It is possible that these physiological systems developed long ago when humans often faced famine and needed to conserve body weight.
Today, say the researchers, this type of famine protection makes the body desperate to hold onto the fat tissue it creates. Consequently, it is very difficult for most people to overcome the body’s opposition to weight loss. Complicating matters: Today’s modern society promotes processed, high calorie foods and discourages exercise.
“Although lifestyle modifications may result in lasting weight loss in individuals who are overweight, in those with chronic obesity, bodyweight seems to become biologically ‘stamped in’ and defended,” says researcher Dr. Christopher Ochner, who teaches pediatrics and psychiatry at Mount Sinai. “Few individuals ever truly recover from obesity; rather they suffer from ‘obesity in remission.’ They are biologically very different from individuals of the same age, sex, and bodyweight who never had obesity.”
As a result, taking off the weight and keeping it off is possible, but it is difficult and requires a life-long commitment to staying thin. At the present time, these researchers believe, only certain types of stomach bypass surgery have been shown to be consistently successful in helping obese people keep their weight down.
