Why The Weight Comes Back Every Time You Lose It (The Science Behind Weight Loss & Maintenance)

Have you ever lost weight successfully, only to find yourself gaining it back months later?

If so, you're not alone. And contrary to what many people believe, it isn't always because you "fell off track," lacked willpower, or stopped caring about your goals.

In this episode, we're diving into one of the most misunderstood parts of weight loss: what happens after the diet ends.

Many women focus entirely on getting into a calorie deficit to lose weight, but very few understand what needs to happen once they reach their goal weight. The reality is that the calorie intake that maintained your previous weight will likely be too high to maintain a lighter body. If you return to eating exactly the way you did before losing weight, the weight often comes back. Not because you failed, but because your body's calorie needs have changed.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why weight regain is so common after successful weight loss
• The difference between a weight-loss calorie intake and a maintenance calorie intake
• How calorie needs change as your body weight changes
• Why going back to your old eating habits often leads to regaining weight
• What maintenance actually looks like in real life
• How to think about calories after reaching your goal weight
• The simple math behind maintaining a lower body weight long-term

If you've ever wondered why the weight seems to come back every time you lose it, this episode will help you understand what's really happening and how to avoid repeating the same cycle.

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1. Website: Health Coach for Teachers & Busy, Working Women
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Topics covered in this episode: weight loss, calorie deficit, maintenance calories, weight regain, sustainable weight loss, fat loss, metabolism, dieting, healthy habits, long-term weight loss, nutrition, calorie balance

Transcript

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Hey everyone, and welcome back to another Healthy Huddle episode where I give you quick ideas for fast action. Today I want to talk to you about why you gain the weight back every single time you lose it from a scientific, biological perspective. What is going on in your body that is causing the weight to come back every single time you you lose it? I'm not talking in this episode about your behaviors. I'm not talking about the mindset shifts that need to be made because those things definitely impact it, right? The self-sabotage, the unhealthy relationship with food, the all or nothing mindset, those things are definitely pieces to it. But I want to help you understand the science of why this is happening. Because once you can understand the science, then you can start to make peace with food. You can start to help to heal your relationship with food. And then we start to see shifts in the longevity of your weight loss. These are the type of things that I educate my clients on. I help you when you work with me understand how you to lose the weight from a scientific perspective, how to make sure the weight stays off from a scientific perspective, as well as giving you the mindset shifts that you need to make it all last and last in a way that you feel good, where you're actually enjoying your life. There's no restriction, there's no dieting, there's no food rules. It's just truly you eat in a way that you enjoy the food and the weight falls off and then stays off. So, with that being said, in this episode, I want to just give you a piece of understanding in why the weight comes back every single time you lose it. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Isn't You Powerful Podcast. I'm your host, Laura B, health coach, educator, and founder of the Be Healthy Lifestyle. I'm here to bring you all of the health education and motivation so that you can sign off each week feeling equipped and empowered to tackle all of your health goals. Come along with me as I teach you the basics of healthy living so that you can have everyone in your life saying, Isn't she powerful? The food that you eat, that's the food that fuels your body. And whatever your current weight is, is the set point at which your body is turning those calories into energy. That is metabolism. Metabolism is the rate at which your body turns the food that you eat into energy. Metabolism gets quote unquote sped up whenever we actively use the food that we are eating. So if you eat a meal and then you go for a walk, your body has to burn that food to use for immediate fuel. So your metabolism is speeding up to turn that food into fuel even faster. Same thing goes for if you have done a big workout or maybe you've been doing weightlifting. This is why weightlifting is so beneficial for weight loss because if you've been doing weightlifting, your muscles are more tired. They're gonna require a little bit more help from your food throughout the day to make sure that you can still get up and do all of the things. So it's going to take that food that you eat and immediately turn it into fuel for you to use to feed those muscles that you have just been breaking down by lifting these weights. So, with that being said, the weight that you are currently at has a specific set point of calories that are needed to maintain the weight that you currently exist at. I'm gonna give a random number example here. These are not accurate numbers. This is just a for the sake of the example, right? Let's say that you are five foot three, 160 pounds. The set calories for that height and weight may be depending on your age and other things, lifestyle factors, exercise, all of that good stuff. That's why I'm saying this is an example. Everybody is unique, but let's say that your set calories is 1,900 calories every single day, 1900 calories throughout the course of the day. Eating 1900 calories a day will maintain your weight at 160 pounds. Let's say that you want to lose weight, you would drop that caloric intake down. That is the only way to see weight loss is if we eat less calories than our body needs. Now, we can achieve a caloric deficit by more exercise, eating less food, eating less calorically dense food, more vegetables, more lean proteins. There's lots of ways to achieve that caloric deficit, but that is the only way for us to see weight loss is if we are eating less calories than our body needs to maintain its current weight. So you're gonna drop that 1900 calories down to 1,500 calories. So now you are achieving a caloric deficit each and every day. That's gonna start to see that number on the scale go down as well. Let's say that you get to 145 pounds, you're happy there, you're like, yeah, I've achieved my weight loss call, I lost my 15 pounds, I feel really good, awesome job. So you start back eating the same amount of calories that you were eating before. You go off of this quote-unquote diet and you go back to eating 1900 calories. The chat this is where the problem comes in. The problem now is that you are now eating the amount of calories it took to maintain a 160-pound body. You're not eating the calories it takes to maintain a 145-pound body. Do you see what I'm getting at here? The reason why you gain weight back every single time that you go off the diet is because you go back to eating the amount of calories it took to maintain a body at a previous weight. So, what do you do to avoid this situation? You do not need to eat in a calorie deficit forever. You'll continue to lose weight forever. You get to that new weight that you feel happy about, your goal weight, you're there, you're quote 145 pounds based on what we were talking about earlier. Let's stick with that example. You get to that 145 pounds, you need to reassess. Go back into the calorie calculator wherever you may find something like that. Put your information back in, and you can see there, okay, my caloric intake to maintain 145 pounds is now 1700 calories. So now instead of eating 1500 and being in a deficit, or eating 1900 and maintaining 160-pound body, I need to eat 1700 calories per day to maintain 145-pound body. This is the magic key. The thing that so many people are missing is we go off of the diet, go back to eating how we were before, and now we are once again maintaining the amount of calories that we need to maintain a body weight that we don't want to have. So we need to adjust our new maintenance calories. So here's what I recommend that you do with this information now. I recommend that you start with a week of understanding how many calories are you eating on average. Do that by just simply tracking it in an app. I track it in a notebook every once in a while just to make sure that I'm in a caloric range that I is for maintenance of my body weight that I want to stay at. So I just track it in a notebook, track it wherever you want to, but keep a running log of how many calories you're eating on average each day. And then once you can understand that, if you want to lose weight, subtract about two to three hundred from what your daily average is. That's what you're gonna eat at for about two to three months. That caloric deficit can last for about two to three months or until you've reached whatever your goal weight is. Once you get to that goal weight, you are going to need to readjust your maintenance calories. Go online, type in your information, say I'm 5'3, 145 pounds, 54 years old, I want to maintain this weight, how many calories do I need to be eating per day? There's a really good tool that I use, it's just caloriecalculator.com, I think. Uh, and that's where I figure out what are the what's a good range of maintenance calories, weight loss calories, and things along those lines. So that is what I recommend that you do from here on out. Start understanding the maintenance calories. And I'm not saying that you need to track your calories forever. I am in no way saying that. I really do not track calories hardly at all. What I am saying is that we need to have some kind of understanding of it. I repeat so many of my meals, so I have a pretty good knowledge base of okay, I understand, you know, an apple's about a hundred calories, 150, depending on the size of the apple, two tablespoons of peanut butter is about a hundred calories, whatever. Like I have a pretty good understanding of those things. So now that I have been doing it for quite some time, I don't need to track every single thing that I eat every single day. But there is advantages to having that now knowledge base, to understanding how many calories are you eating per day. Maybe you could look at how many calories you're eating per day and say, oh, I'm really eating so much more than I thought I was. Maybe you're eating really calorically dense foods, even though they're all super healthy foods. Maybe you're choosing really calorically dense versions of those foods, and that's why you're not losing any weight. They might be clean foods, they might be things that don't have any seed oils or whatever in them, but they're still calorically dense. And so you're eating at your maintenance calories, even though you're eating healthy foods. Or maybe you're gonna see on the opposite end of that that you are severely under-eating. And this is something that I also help my clients with a lot is understanding if they're under-eating, what do the next steps need to be? And maybe I can make an entire podcast episode about that if that would be helpful for you guys. Just let me know if that was something that would be beneficial for you. I'm always taking listener requests. You can go right down into the show notes at the top. There's a link that says send us a text. You can just send in a little text and say, hey, I'd really like a conversation about under-eating, what to do if we realize we're undereating, how do I know if I'm undereating? If that's a conversation you want me to have on the podcast, just say the word and I will be happy to record that episode. But you might see from tracking your calories for a week that you're eating such little food. And when you do eat too little food, your body goes into scarcity mode and it is not going to release anything extra off of your body. It's just gonna say, nope, we aren't getting enough as is. There's no way I'm getting rid of what we already have. So if you're under-eating, that makes weight loss that much more challenging. So it's definitely something to be aware of, and that's why I recommend track for a week, see about how many calories you are eating, and then once you understand that, we can we can make adjustments to either start seeing some weight loss or get to a maintenance calories at the place where you do want to be. Okay, so with all of this being said, I hope that it gave you a little bit of insight into why you gain your weight back every single time you lose it because I know that that is the most frustrating thing. I would love so much to get to support you in your journey through seismic shift one-on-one coaching. Reach out to me. I will leave information down in the show notes below for you to check out those two options. But regardless, you can always find me over on Instagram and I will answer any questions that you have. I look forward to seeing you again in the next episode. Bye y'all. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see you again next week. And always remember the more you know, the more you grow.