You’ve seen it in movies, television shows, books and probably in real life, too. Overweight people ”reform” themselves by joining the local gym, eating right, and basically adopting an overall healthy lifestyle in order to remove themselves of the constant poking, prodding and taunting by others … or to quiet a possible internal demon within themselves.

However, as hard as they try, after months of trying the latest diet fads and workout crazes, the obese individual fails to keep  a healthy body weight and promptly quits, causing him or her to gain all of the weight back all too quickly.

Studies in the past have revealed that soon after overweight people lost weight, their metabolism came to a halt and they were then subjected to hormonal changes that lead to a stronger appetite. Most researchers believed that this was why so many dieters gained their weight back, and now a group of Australian scientists have decided to take these studies further by investigating the hormonal changes over a longer period of time.

Details of the Study

For the study, healthy people were recruited who were either overweight or obese, and were then put on highly restrictive diets which caused them to lose close to ten percent of their body weight. These diets had some individuals eating as little as 500 calories per day. All the test subjects had an average weight of 209 pounds, and their initial hormonal levels, appetites and hunger were measured after they ate toast, boiled eggs, crackers, orange juice and margarine.

Once the weight was lost, the subjects were then placed on a proper diet which was meant to support their new body weight. A year later, much to their surprise, the researchers found that the participants’ hormonal and metabolism levels still had not gone back to normal levels. Though the analysis confirms previous suspicions about why it is so hard to lose weight and actually keep it off, the study itself was rather insignificant. Out of the 50 participants, 16 of them quit or failed to lose the body weight, lessening the scope of the study.

The Hormones at Fault

The two hormones that could be at fault are leptin and peptide YY.  Basically Leptin tells the brain how much body fat is present. When a person loses weight, leptin decreases and that leads to a declining metabolism and an increase in appetite.  Peptide YY increases during weight loss and this troublesome hormone triggers the hunger mechanism.

In addition to changing the way you eat and how often you get exercise to lose weight the healthy way, one must add hormonal levels to the equation. With no drugs currently available to help restore hormones to “normal” levels after weight loss, this report shows us just how difficult an overweight person’s efforts to lose weight – and keep it off – can be.