Why Do So Many People Regain Weight?

Fight back by keeping exercise routines, fresh and fun.

Why do so many people gain weight after losing it?

One good answer involves determining what kind of weight was lost. In our desperation to slim down, we can sacrifice quality weight loss (primarily body fat) with a partial fat/partial muscle combination—a natural occurrence if you’re not following a ketogenic diet, like Ideal Protein or if you’re exercising vigorously while drastically cutting calories.  If weight loss involves a significant portion of muscle, your basal metabolic rate will decrease and your metabolism will be slower.  That’s not our objective and if you’ve lost weight with us, you know that.

But that’s not what this article is about. What if you’ve lost quality weight, dropped your body fat percentage by 5 or ten percent—and you still feel your skinny jeans getting tight. Are you failing? Did the diet fail? Does your body “want” to be overweight?

Learning to maintain a healthy weight is more like doing laundry and less like going to Europe. I’ll explain.

Let’s say you went to Europe—Italy.  It might have been thirty years ago, it might have been for  only one day—but for the rest of your life, whenever the subject of international travel comes up, you can chime in with experiences from your incredible Italian escapade. It takes no further effort. The story is true and it’s yours.

Now let’s talk about laundry. When’s the last time you washed a load of clothes?  When’s the next time you’ll do laundry? Your laundering skills may be utilized daily or weekly—but unlike a dreamy trip to the Italian countryside it won’t be once and it can’t be thirty years ago. The reality is that keeping clothing clean—especially if you have children, takes daily effort and if you turn your back on it—even briefly, you’ll have a mountain-sized pile of stinky socks and dirty T-shirts to deal with.

Keeping your weight off is like that.

We like the words natural and organic. Did you know it’s natural to gain weight? Here are two reasons:

1. It’s easier to eat more than our incredibly efficient bodies require, just like it’s easier to spend money than earn it.
2. Our bodies are built to store fat, not lose it. Why is that? Only about 4 days of carbohydrates are stored as glycogen in our muscles and liver—if that was ever depleted, without another source of stored energy, we’d be in a bad way. Fat is that stored energy—and there’s no limit as to how much “energy” your body can store. From the point of view of survival, that’s a good thing.

From this we conclude that gaining weight—about five to ten pounds, over the course of six months to a year, is natural. But does that mean we move up a dress size every year or expect to regain everything we lost? Should we resign ourselves to fast food and self-hate because weight gain is inevitable?

No!

It means you fight back. You develop a strategy. You change what doesn’t work and give yourself grace to learn in the process.

What does fighting back look like?
It means tracking your food, maybe even tracking your macros in addition to calories. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. It means promising to only eat real food—fake food won’t cut it. It means falling in love with your kitchen, because if you don’t cook most of your own meals, you’ll struggle.

It’s time to start running, join CrossFit, try a class at the Y, hire a personal trainer, buy a bike or a treadmill or a jump rope and get sweaty, consistently. Mediocre effort yield mediocre results.

Keep practicing health. I can’t say the battle gets easier but I promise that you’ll get stronger.

I’m glad you lost weight just like I’m happy you took a nice vacation. But do you care as much about the other fifty weeks in the year? If so, it’s time to roll up your sleeves—again, and wash another load.

You got this,
Dionne
 

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