Are “body weight set points” real?

CanadaGracie

When I was losing the pregnancy weight 20 years ago people talked a lot about the idea that your body has a weight “set point” and nothing you do can change it, so even if you do lose weight your body will find a way to make you gain it back. I’ve already told my body that I don’t accept that and it better not try to pull that nonsense, but is that still a prevailing theory? I’ve read a lot of articles about weight loss medications and people regaining when they’re off them but I can understand that if they needed the medication for a specific physiological reason or if they didn’t create new, healthier habits while on the drugs and then just fell back into their old habits once their appetite was no longer suppressed. But I hate to think that the science shows that people who lose weight naturally end up gaining it back even if they’ve fundamentally and permanently changed their relationship with food, their diet and their physical activity. I’m just wondering if anyone has a sense of what the current generally accepted wisdom around setpoint is in the scientific community?

sollyn23l2

Yes and no. Your body will always tend to seek homeostasis and it will slow down or speed up various bodily processes in order to maintain more or less your current weight. This is why losing and gaining weight can feel so difficult. The good news is, once you have been at a lower weight for a while, that lower weight will likely become your new "set point".

Lietchi

Set points are more about habits, I believe: people going back to old habits, as you mentioned.

There is a thing though where hunger cues can be out off whack for a while after a large weight loss: if you don't keep a handle on the increased agitatie appetite (=stick to your new habits), it can cause a regain.
It should settle after a number of months.

tomcustombuilder

Yes they are real. Your brain and stomach work together to totally derail any attempts you make to get below that weight, so you have your work cut out for you to go lower from there.

Sometimes your homeostatic system will retain water to balance out Fatloss to maintain bodyweight and at some point you’ll get that whoosh effect and the water is released and you’ll experience a sudden drop on the scale.

Lietchi

Lietchi wrote: »

Set points are more about habits, I believe: people going back to old habits, as you mentioned.

There is a thing though where hunger cues can be out off whack for a while after a large weight loss: if you don't keep a handle on the increased agitatie appetite (=stick to your new habits), it can cause a regain.
It should settle after a number of months.

Too late to edit the comment itself

AnnPT77

There's a good discussions of set point theory over in the Debate Club area. (Note that discussion in that area tends to be more frank and "gloves off" than in the support-oriented parts of the Community, though it's still expected to stay polite.)

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10890746/set-point-theory

There are also some in Health and Weight Loss, such as:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10822721/set-point-weight-theory/p1

Opinions vary, and people will cite research sources in some of those threads.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the "biological set point so weight loss is doomed" version. Part of my rationale is that I've known quite a few more than one person who's lost a material amount of weight and kept it off long term after years or even decades of being obese/overweight. (These days, I might be one of them, in year 8 of maintaining a healthy weight at age 68, overweight/obese for most of my adult life until age 59, severely hypothyroid (medicated) and menopausal besides.)

While many people do either fail to lose much weight, or regain the weight that was lost, some do stay at a health(ier) weight. In the US, the National Weight Control Registry enrolls people who are maintaining lost weight, and does research on the hows and whys:

http://www.nwcr.ws/

Personally, I think the bigger factor is that we have comfortable default habits,. Habit change of any kind can be difficult to create, and even more difficult to sustain . . . weight management, or anything else. Since we must eat, and many of us have learned to use food as a reward or to self-soothe, or something similar, changing eating habits can be especially challenging.

Perhaps we observed certain eating or activity habits in our families as we grew up, and came to think of those as normal. We maybe learned to cook and eat in familiar ways as we entered adulthood. Our social context (friends, co-workers, etc.) also exerts influence. Humans tend to want to conform to group norms, to be "one of the guys/gals" to some extent. If our social group uses food/eating for social bonding, socializes over happy hour, etc., maybe that's a complicating factor. It can be difficult to swim upstream, and some social groups will even tease or criticize someone who starts behaving differently. This stuff is surprisingly powerful!

On top of that, IMO, many people who decide to lose weight think they need to do something alien or extreme: Restrictive eating rules about only eating "good" foods, never eating "junk" or "fast" food, etc.; exercise routines that are intense, extreme, unpleasant, even punitive. It's as if we believe becoming fat was a sin we need to expiate by suffering! But all of that is a myth. Making habit change harder than it needs to be also makes failure more likely.

And yes, there is some physiological and biological homeostasis, physical changes in the body that can make loss harder, because our bodies (shaped by natural selection to survive food shortages) can't tell a weight loss diet from a famine.

Even though the title might not reflect "set point", this thread summarizes some of the search related to those physical factors (in the first several posts that are written by the OP), so it might give you some perspective:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1077746/starvation-mode-adaptive-thermogenesis-and-weight-loss/p1

I think change - long-term or even permanent change - is possible. Some people here achieve it. Some people have more challenges than others, and I expect that that includes some genetic factors, ingrained psychological factors, and some unconscious lifelong behaviors. (Example: Some research suggests that obese people, even after weight loss, tend to be more placid in daily life behavior, vs. lifelong-slim people, who may be more movement oriented (even fidgety); and that that difference can be worth up to a couple of hundred calories per day.)