Weight loss drugs have taken the world by storm, but recent studies have shown that even these miracle workers have a fatal flaw: people often regain their original weight after taking them.
This includes people like Artemis Bayandor, 41, a flight attendant from Illinois, who used Ozempic to lose 15 pounds. After stopping the medication due to concerns about cost, Bayanador gained the weight back, plus an extra 16 pounds.
According to a new study, if you’re like Bayanador and the numbers on your scale keep going up after losing weight, biology may be to blame.
Researchers in Switzerland discovered that the body’s fat cells have a “memory” that tells them to continue growing, even after losing weight.
The team used fat cells from people with obesity and people with a healthy weight to see if there were differences in their genes that could control their weight gain.
They found that obese people had permanent changes to their DNA that affected the way their cells use and store energy, even after losing weight.
These genes made their metabolism less active, making it difficult to process food without gaining weight.
This could explain why some people struggle to maintain weight after going on a diet, said the study’s lead author, Professor Ferdinand Von Meyenn of ETH Zurich.
Artemis Bayandor, 41, of Illinois, says he now weighs about 20 pounds more than before using Wegovy. He lost 15 pounds while taking the medication for six months, but quickly gained all the weight and extra weight back.
Stanford studies suggest that 80 to 85 percent of people struggle to maintain weight after losing a significant amount.
Professor Von Meyenn told Bloomberg: “This is not just a lack of will or willpower, but there is actually a molecular mechanism that fights this weight loss.”
Between 80 and 85 percent of people who lose a significant amount of weight later regain it, according to Stanford Medicine. Sometimes this is because people fall back into old habits, but other times, the pounds pile on again, seemingly without cause.
This mystery is what motivated Swiss researchers to study genes, and their results were published in the journal Nature magazine.
Genes are the instructions that dictate every part of our biology, but they can be influenced by small chemical changes called epigenetic changes.
Epigenetics is how behaviors and the environment can cause changes in DNA. These changes are reversible, unlike genetic changes, which permanently alter DNA.
They can be caused by things like exposure to air pollution, childhood dietary choices, substance use, and even trauma at a young age. according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Research has shown that these epigenetic changes are linked to cancer, substance use disorders, dementia, and aging.
Professor Von Meyenn and his colleagues wanted to look at the epigenetics of people with weight fluctuations and see if they differed from those who sat at a constant lean weight.
They took samples of fatty tissue from 10 thin people and 13 obese people.
They also took samples from overweight mice and compared them to samples from mice with a healthy weight.
They then studied the fat tissue of people who had struggled with their weight and found that they had consistent epigenetic changes in the parts of their genes that control energy.
These changes suppressed metabolism, making it more difficult to maintain weight.
This suggests that even after losing weight, these cells “remember” their previous state and are likely to return to their previous patterns.
Professor Von Meyeenn he told Bloomberg He explained that this may happen because cells became accustomed to the patterns of food processing and fat storage that were necessary in an obese body.
A previous study from the United Kingdom found that people who used Wegovy experienced rapid weight loss, losing 18 percent of their weight in 68 weeks. They regained two-thirds of that weight, or 12 percent of their original body weight, in the year after stopping the weekly injections.
Just because someone loses weight doesn’t automatically mean that those cells, which were programmed by their environment to act in a way, will change, he said.
So if you’re able to avoid becoming obese in the first place, then your cells won’t be trained to return to that state, he suggested.
Professor Von Meyeen said: “If you have never been obese, you will never be exposed to that memory and you will never have the problem of regaining weight.”
A recent study found that the power of these epigenetic drives to gain weight may outlast even the dramatic changes associated with the use of appetite-controlling medications, such as Ozempic or Wegovy.
These medications, known scientifically as GLP-1 receptor agonists, mimic signals in the body that tell the brain when you feel full and control the rate at which food moves through the gastrointestinal tract.
Researchers at Northwestern University found that most patients who had been taking one of these weight loss drugs regained two-thirds of the weight they had lost.
This is concerning given the number of people who start taking the drug and choose to stop, the scientists said.
About 85 percent of people taking these types of medications stop using them after two years. So, to overcome yo-yoing, doctors suggest that a GLP-1 user should continue taking the drug for life.