Losing weight and keeping it off can be especially difficult for people who are obese, but a new study shows maintaining a weight loss for a year may be a way to retrain the body into accepting a new lower weight.
“This study shows that if an overweight person is able to maintain an initial weight loss—in this case for a year—the body will eventually ‘accept’ this new weight and thus not fight against it, as is otherwise normally the case when you are in a calorie-deficit state,” says Signe Sørensen Torekov, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
Published in the “European Journal of Endocrinology,” the study shows that after one year of successful weight-loss maintenance, there was a marked increase in levels of two appetite-inhibiting hormones (GLP-1 and PYY). The hunger hormone ghrelin also increased immediately after weight loss but returned to normal levels after one year.
