If you’ve been overweight for a long time, you might find it extremely difficult to get back in shape despite diet and exercise. On the other hand, most of us don’t have issues with losing a few newly-gained pounds, as long as one condition is met – we do it fast!
Dieters have noticed it long ago: there must be some sort of correlation between the period of time you’ve been carrying extra weight and the degree of difficulty of losing that weight. It seems that after being overweight for a while your body flips a switch, re-programming you to stay overweight – your new “normal”.The researchers from the University of Michigan and the Argentina-based National Council of Science and Technology (CONICET) decided to shed some light on this by conducting a joint research, which involved overfeeding mice. The suspicion was true: the longer mice stayed overweight, the harder it was to get them back to normal weight by dieting and exercise.
I know this doesn’t sound very optimistic, but it’s still helpful to know. At least now you’ll be more eager to lose any newly-gained weight fast.
This of course doesn’t mean that you can never succeed and reach your goal weight, but it does explain these frustrating periods when you experience weight loss plateaus. It’s interesting to note that people tend to plateau at the same point every time, perhaps it’s exactly that point where “switch” was flipped before? Read more about weight loss plateaus here »
