Rapid weight loss sounds like the ideal way to lose weight. But with weight rapid weight loss, comes rapid weight gain. Yes, many of us have seen it, that if you’ve lost a ton of weight, then you would’ve had a hard time also keeping the weight down. Read on to know why your body gains weight after drastic weight loss, and how you lose weight without gaining it back.

To achieve rapid weight loss, you need to take extreme measures like crash dieting, excessive exercising and others. Weight loss efforts like these can result in nutritional deficiencies in the long run, and other long term health effects. Besides all the detrimental side effects on your health, your body has a strong tendency to gain the weight back. Let’s explain one concept first: 

Your brain controls a lot of what you feel, including hunger. Hunger is a feeling that is created by the brain because its a signal that the body needs calories. Often our body signals something else (like water, sleep, etc), and our brain assumes its a need for food. Now, assume that you’re weight was X kg for some time. Now, to keep it at X kg, your body was used to eating a certain amount of food (calories), and spending a certain amount of calories through your physical activities, and your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). So, your body was basically used to maintaining X kg of weight.Now, by taking some measures like crash dieting, or excessive exercising, etc, you manage to reduce your weight to Y kg in a couple of weeks. Since this was a crash diet or a crazy exercise plan, you burnt a ton of calories. But since it was extreme, you did it for a short time of a few weeks and got the results. Now, in these few weeks, your body was shocked into burning calories and you lost weight. Your brain assumes it was a traumatic period, and life will come back to normal. So, after these extreme couple of weeks, you return to a normal lifestyle at Y kg. Your brain does not realize that your weight has actually reduced and still operates at a level of X kg. So it still creates hunger for X kg. Since your weight is much less at Y kg, and you eat for X kg (where X is more than Y), your brain makes you overeat, and you land up slowly gaining the weight back. Also, over the past few weeks, your body was deprived of its expected calories.

So, it will try to make up, and your brain will direct you to attack high calorie food to make up for the calorie loss (also called binge eating). Your brain is still trying to go back to the X kg weight. Eventually, after returning to your normal lifestyle, you will slowly inch your way back to gaining the weight, and reaching X kg. Maybe even more than X kg. This yo yo process of weight loss and weight gain, besides affecting us at a psychological level, also affects us physically. Can even lead to stretch marks. It stinks, but its true.

To really create a sustainable weight loss, you need to follow 2 rules:– 

  • Creating a large calorie deficit in your lifestyle is not the way to sustainable weight loss.
  • It needs a gradual lifestyle change for you to slowly improve your eating habits, and your physical activity.

Again, drastic measures don’t work!It took you time to gain the weight, so give yourself time to lose the weight. Create a gradual change in lifestyle with small steps towards a healthier body through nutrition and exercise.