As if people needed a reminder that losing weight is hard and
maintaining weight loss is even harder, a study has found that for at
least a year, subjects who shed weight on a low-calorie diet were
hungrier than when they started and had higher levels of hormones that
tell the body to eat more, conserve energy and store away fuel as fat.
The report, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of
Medicine, helps explain why roughly 80 percent of dieters regain lost
pounds within a year or two of losing them -- and, sometimes, regain
more.
After weight loss, "multiple compensatory mechanisms" spring to life,
the study shows, and work together to ensure that weight loss is
reversed quickly and efficiently.
The researchers, led by Joseph Proietto of the University of
Melbourne's Department of Medicine, write that more than one solution to
obesity will likely be necessary: "a combination of medications" that
will have to be safe for long-term use.
Two-thirds of Americans and a growing proportion of the developing
world's population are overweight or obese, and though obesity rates in
the United States have begun to stabilize, there's been no significant
decline.
The Australian study paints a "very comprehensive" and "really
discouraging" picture of the breadth of the body's response to weight
loss, said Dr. Daniel Bessesen, an endocrinologist and obesity
researcher at University of Colorado's Denver Health Medical Center. It
captures just how many resources the body musters to ensure that weight
is restored -- a long list of hormones that regulate appetite, feelings
of fullness after eating and how calories are used.
The study enrolled 50 obese men and women without major health
problems and put them on a strict low-calorie diet for eight weeks.
Within two weeks after that diet, and again a year later, researchers
measured subjects' blood levels of nine distinct hormones that affect
appetite and metabolism, and asked subjects about feelings of hunger
after meals, between meals and as mealtimes approached.
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