
You probably already know this from your own experience. You’ll try a new eating plan, lose a few pounds, and then either get stuck or regain the weight. This doesn’t happen because you’re messing up or because you don’t have willpower. Instead, studies show that it’s because each of us has a “set point,” which is the weight your body works to maintain—whether or not that weight is actually healthy. Check out this article published in the National Library of Medicine for details: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039924/
Your set point is determined by your biology, genetics, and environment, and it is regulated closely by your brain.
Specifically, your set point is the result of how your unique metabolism (determined by your biology and genetics) responds to factors like the food you eat, the amount you sleep, how much you exercise, and even the emotional stress you’re under (all influenced by your environment).
Your system is so committed to keeping you at this “target” weight that if you reduce the amount you eat for a sustained period of time, your body will operate as though there’s a food shortage and go into starvation mode to defend it. Here’s what happens:
- Your metabolism (the process of turning food to energy) slows down. Your body is programmed to use energy as efficiently as possible. When there’s a decrease in the amount of energy coming in, your metabolism slows in an attempt to conserve it.
- You feel hungrier. You will begin to produce more of certain hormones in your stomach that signal hunger to your brain. As a result, you’ll want to eat more. Ghrelin is one hunger hormone involved in this process that we’ll talk about throughout the program.
- You also feel less full. Because satiety (fullness) hormones are produced in fat tissue, as you lose weight, less fat is available to make these hormones. Leptin is one of these satiety hormones that we’ll refer to often.
The good news is that your set point isn’t permanently fixed. It can be altered through interventions that target biological, genetic, and environmental factors together. This is where the concept of looking at the whole person and working with the body’s natural ability to heal comes in.