For years, women have been told that managing their weight is largely a matter of discipline: eat less, move more, stay consistent. But our bodies have their own ideas about how much energy we should store – and when we try to change that balance, they don’t always cooperate.
According to Dr. Sasha High, Founder and CEO of the High Metabolic Clinic and weight management physician, there may be a biological reason for that.
One of the biggest misconceptions about weight loss, she says, is that it simply comes down to willpower.
“I think this is the part that a lot of people don’t understand,” Dr. High says. “It’s just, ‘Do your calorie counting, move your body, you should be able to do this,’ without realizing that from an ancient perspective, we were made to hold on to fat for times when energy was scarce.”
Our bodies, in other words, aren’t necessarily designed to make losing weight easy.
When we lose body fat, levels of a hormone called leptin also drop. The brain interprets that change as a potential threat – essentially, a signal that energy stores are running low.
The body then tries to conserve energy and encourage us to eat.
“It sees it as, ‘Oh my goodness, you could be dying. You could be starving to death. Let’s conserve as much as possible. Let’s slow down the metabolic rate. Let’s get you seeking food,’” says Dr. High.
That can mean more cravings, more thoughts about food and a stronger drive to eat. And because we now live in a modern world, where food is abundant, that can often lead to overconsumption and weight regain.
The M-factor
For women in midlife, there can be another piece of the puzzle. During the menopause transition, insulin resistance can increase, while declining estrogen can contribute to changes in where fat is stored.
“The hormonal changes of menopause, mainly the dropping levels of estrogen, don’t actually cause weight gain, and that’s pretty well established,” Dr. High says. “What the dropping estrogen does do, though, is cause a change in body composition.”
For many women, that often shows up as midsection weight gain that wasn’t there before.
Now, Dr. High will be the first to point out that none of this means weight change is inevitable, or that healthy habits don’t matter. It really just means the picture is more complicated than calories in, calories out – and that struggling to lose weight isn’t a personal failure.
As she so eloquently puts it: “As most people say: it’s easy to lose the weight, very hard to keep the weight off.” And now, we might just know why.
