If you regain weight after losing it, it’s not your fault…
When you regain weight after losing weight, it’s common to blame yourself for shortcomings.
FACT: If you regain weight after losing it, it’s not your fault…
It’s because our bodies are carefully designed to defend against weight loss. For most people, intentional weight loss involves a self imposed famine. Meaning, if you’re not giving your body enough food energy, it goes into famine mode, just as it would were there an actual famine.
Famine mode is designed to keep us alive when food is scarce.
Famine mode results into the brain going into hyperdrive thinking about food; food looks better, smells better, tastes better and you can’t help but think about food a lot of the time. Sound familiar?
Famine mode slows down our metabolism so we don’t need to eat much food to keep our bodies functioning.
Famine mode messes with our appetite hormones where your hunger and fullness hormones respond differently to when you’re adequately fed. You may not feel very hungry until you eat, and then you feel ravenous and want to eat everything. Your fullness hormone may then be slow to kick in allowing you to eat more food then usual.
Famine mode is a key reason people regain weight and NOT because:
- You stopped the diet
- You ate too much or the wrong food
- You didn’t have enough willpower
- You didn’t exercise hard enough
- Your routine changed
- You went on holiday and never “got back into it”
- You started a new relationship and food was a big part
- You didn’t try hard enough
For an alternative to pursuing weight loss and the way to avoid famine mode, click here. For more of the research on why diets and pursuing weight loss doesn’t work long-term, click here.
