Weight loss makes you fat


If you are starting to lose weight seriously, you need to make sure you are doing it healthily and safely. Weight loss regimens are enticing, but they are often far too one-sided and special to become a permanent part of a dieter’s new life.

Some time ago, I had a patient at my office, Pekka, who had lost 30 kg. That sounded a lot to me. When I asked him how he had done it, he said it was just impossible: “I just stopped eating.” It has now been two years and the weight had returned to 40 kg. "I started eating normally again," said Pekka.

Weight loss

My supervisor, Aila Rissanen, then head of the Obesity Research Unit at HUS, was the first person I heard to use the word ‘weight loss’. The word perfectly reflects this yo-yo phenomenon. Dieting is often a repetitive activity. Every spring now-for-summer-condition- or every fall shed-summer-pounds-off-project. Fortunately, these weight loss spikes usually result in a few pounds.

So how so happily? Because if you are starting to lose weight seriously, you need to make sure you are doing it healthily and safely. Diet regimens are certainly appealing and interesting, but they are often far too one-sided and far too special to become a permanent part of a dieter’s new life. They also encourage you to lose weight way too quickly. And too often the importance of exercise is forgotten. Fortunately, therefore, people do not torture themselves with such diets for long.

Appropriate weight loss rate
Weight loss is safe when you lose about 0.5-1 kg of weight per week. Those who are overweight can initially lose up to 1-2 pounds a week. At the beginning of weight loss, when water is naturally removed from the body, weight loss is faster. The longer you lose weight, the more moderate the pace should be. Pekka had lost 30 kg in four months, or 16 weeks, an average of about 2 kg per week. It's half too much, Pekka was too busy.

Save your muscles

Dieters who eat very little, such as Peka, have a high risk of losing not only their adipose tissue but also their muscles. With every pound you lose, some meat is always lost, but the dieter himself can influence how much meat he consumes. If the energy deficit is severe, that is, if you suffer from very little food, the muscle loss will be greater. In addition, if you eat little, it is more difficult to ensure that your diet has enough of the necessary nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.

Muscle loss can be prevented not only by eating enough, but also by eating a lot of protein and exercising a lot. In weight-loss studies, high-protein people have lost about 25% of their lean tissue, or muscle tissue, while a low-protein diet has lost more than 30% of their lean body weight. There are even better results from exercise. For those who lose weight with dietary changes alone, the proportion of lean tissue in weight loss is about 25-30%, but if exercise is combined with weight loss, half of the lean tissue is lost, only 10-15%.

Why does the weight always go back?

Many wonder why they gain weight when they start eating ‘normally’ again after losing weight. True, it rises if the ‘normal’ is what a person tens of pounds bigger used to live in and what had actually originally become overweight.

Up to over 90% of weight loss leads to weight gain. And not just to the level you started from, but usually a few pounds higher - to make sure you have a spare for the next hunger season. This is what happened to Pekka - and so it happens to most other dieters!

Defending weight is biology. We all have a very strong survival drive in this regard. The body would act unnaturally if it allowed pounds to shed easily and permanently. Unfortunately, the body's natural response also includes favoring fat accumulation during the weight gain phase. So if you have lost weight carelessly, you have lost your meat, and as you gain weight you have gained fat instead.

Every dieter is sure to strive to do good for themselves. Nothing is more depressing than after months of tearing, numerous denials, and tenacious efforts to realize that that’s how only the pounds secretly came back. That is why Lighteners is aiming for moderate changes over a long period of time so that new lifestyles become permanent rather than curative dieting.