Why 95% Gain it Back

There's a statistic out there that says 95% of people that lose a significant amount of weight eventually gain it back.

There's a few reasons for this. All of it comes down to survival. The body is a fat storing machine. It wants that energy reserve for times of famine (which we never deal with anymore).

According to Dr. Harry Sitren, Thyroxine (your thyroid hormone) can drop as much as 25-35% during a diet. This slows your metabolic rate and makes it difficult to continue losing weight. When people go off their diets, they usually increase their calories too much. You have to increase very slowly so as to allow your T3 levels to keep up.

Another major reason is the minimal amount of triglyceride in fat cells. Fat cells increase and decrease in size in response to overfeeding and underfeeding respectively. When they grow to a certain size, though, the cell will undergo mitosis and divide - leaving you with more fat cells. This is undesirable as each fat cell wants to store a certain amount of minimum fat. So when you diet, your fat cells will decrease in size. The bottom line is those with more total fat cells will have a harder time keeping their fat off due to more of them hording dietary fat.

Then there's the obvious hunger hormones that contribute to overeating. Leptin, which keeps you satiated, will decrease during a diet while Ghrelin, which triggers hunger, will increase substantially.

Dieting also increase the activity of the enzyme lipoprotein lipase (LPL). This enzyme promotes the storage of fat in both adipose tissue and muscle cells. It increase more in those people who are fattest prior to weight loss.

Another reason I believe people gain back the weight is that they sacrafice a lot of lean tissue in the process. People see the scale weight going back up and freak out even though they're actually gaining back the muscle they lost during a diet.

I believe there's also psychological factors at play and I'm sure there's a multitude of other hormones and/or enzymes etc at play but given this information, it would seem to me that a low fat, high carbohydrate diet is the most appropriate diet after a diet. This type of diet will decrease the amount of potential dietary fat that the fat cells can soak up due to LPL and their minimum requirements. The high carbohydrate content would be most efficient at getting the Thyroid fully functional again. The key is SLOW increases though.