No matter what method you are using to lose weight, you can’t keep losing weight forever.
Eventually, everyone hits a weight plateau, Dr. Scott Butsch, director of Obesity Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic’s Bariatric and Metabolic Institute, told the WhatsNew2Day.
This happens in part because as you lose weight, your appetite increases as your body seeks out the calories it was used to receiving, according to Dr. Kevin Hall, who researches metabolism for the National Institutes of Health.
This biological mechanism exists to ensure that you don’t starve, but it could make dieting more difficult.
But the way you choose to lose weight could help you avoid that plateau for longer, according to Dr. Hall’s new study, published in the journal obesity magazine.
According to Dr. Hall’s new study, people who used medical interventions to lose weight had twice as long before reaching a weight loss plateau.
Dr. Hall found that people who cut calories to lose weight hit a plateau (stopped losing weight) after about a year. Those who lost weight using medications like Ozempic and surgical sleeves peaked around age two.
By analyzing previous data on these three weight loss interventions, Dr. Hall found that medical methods were better at suppressing appetite as people lost weight than traditional diets.
This is a mathematical representation of “something we’ve known forever,” Dr. Butsch said.
Your body prefers to burn food over other energy sources, such as fat stored in our muscles and liver. This is why fat can be stubborn: our body uses it as an energy reserve in case we need it to survive.
So when we restrict food, the brain fires off more signals telling us to eat more to try to preserve fat fuel stores. This drive becomes stronger the more weight we lose, according to previous research by Dr. Hall.
‘It’s almost as if your body has a set point that, once we hit it with weight loss, it resists. It’s almost like a survival function,” said Dr. Frank Chae, a bariatric surgeon and medical director of bariatric surgery at Sky Ridge Medical Center in Colorado. he told WKBW.
This can mean that people who have had success losing weight may see that progress slowly erode or stop, because their body tells them to eat.
This mechanism is particularly strong in obese people, research 2018 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
If you hit this plateau, Dr. Hall said you can try increasing other interventions, such as decreasing your calorie intake even more or increasing your exercise routine.
The traditional diet follows the simple maxim that you should burn more calories than you consume. This often involves diet plans that restrict calories.
First, Hall wanted to see how the appetites of people on a traditional diet changed as they lost weight.
To do this, he analyzed the data collected in 2010. Comprehensive assessment of the long-term effects of reducing energy consumption (CALERIA) study.
In the NIH-sponsored CALERIE study, half of the participants eliminated 800 calories a day from their diet at the start of the study, and half of the participants continued eating their normal diet for three years.
At the end of the study, people who had reduced their daily calories lost an average of 16 pounds, while the control group had gained two pounds.
Using this data, Hall estimated that for every kilogram, or about 2.2 pounds, of weight lost, participants craved 83 additional calories.
At their lowest weight, participants craved 622 more calories per day than when they started losing weight.
This made it harder for them to continue losing weight as the study progressed, because the more weight they lost, the more they craved food.
By the end of the three-year study, participants only managed to reduce their initial intake by about 200 calories. Their weight loss plateaued around the first year of the study.
Ozempic’s active ingredient, semaglutide, led people to want 49 extra calories for every 2.2 pounds of weight they lost, according to a new study by Dr. Hall.
ZepBound’s active ingredient, tirezpatide, led people to want 48 extra calories for every 2.2 pounds of weight they lost.
Next, Hall analyzed data tracking weight loss in people using semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, and tirezpatide, the active ingredient in Zepbound.
These medications mimic GLP-1, a hormone that is responsible for telling you that you are full. They reduce the rate at which food leaves the stomach and makes you feel fuller for longer.
When they started injecting Ozempic or Wegovy, Hall found that people consumed 1,300 fewer calories than before they started. When they started taking Zepbound, they consumed 1,560 fewer calories than before they started taking the medication.
Those who injected Ozempic craved 49 extra calories for every kilogram they lost, and with Zepbound, they craved 48 extra calories for every kilogram they lost.
In both groups, weight loss plateaued after about two years.
When Hall investigated the effect of bariatric surgery, he found that the participants’ appetite was reduced more than the calorie restriction group.
Bariatric surgery is a general term that encompasses surgeries such as gastric bypass, gastric sleeves, and LAP bands, which surgically restrict the size of the stomach so patients eat less.
Those who underwent weight-loss surgery cut about 3,600 calories from their diet each day, Dr. Hall estimated. He note that many of these surgeries were performed on people who consumed more than the recommended 2,500 calories a day.
As they lost weight due to this calorie deficit, people who underwent bariatric surgery craved 58 calories daily for every 2.2 pounds lost. It also took them about two years to reach a weight loss plateau.
Hitting a plateau doesn’t have to be the end of your weight loss journey, Dr. Hall said.
If you haven’t completely reached your goals yet, you can incorporate a more rigorous exercise routine or a different diet.
Weight loss, Dr. Hall said, is a lifelong commitment to changing your behaviors. That doesn’t change depending on the method you choose.
Even so-called miracle drugs like Ozempic have their limits, Dr. Chae said. ‘Medicines are a good tool, but they are not a cure.
“You have to keep injecting this indefinitely, and the drug companies don’t really know what the long-term effects are, meaning years later, what the long-term effects are.”
Regardless of where you are on your weight journey (stalled, losing or gaining pounds), Dr. Butsch said, you shouldn’t feel frustrated with yourself.
‘Weight plateaus are normal and expected and occur after periods of weight loss. And we shouldn’t worry about reaching a plateau if we’re trying to lose weight,” Dr. Butsch said.
Adding that this plateau could actually be seen as a sign that “the changes that [you’ve] “They’re really having a positive impact.”