The Fat Rebound

Do you ever wonder why it's so difficult for people to lose weight, and even more difficult to keep it off? There is a physiological basis for this, and its implications go beyond the scope of obesity, posing a more significant threat to children whose BMIs continue to climb at alarming rates.

We all have fat, it keeps us warm and supplies us with energy while fasting. Tens of thousands of years ago, before the advent of agriculture and modern civilization, homo sapiens living far enough north or south of the equator were scrounging around for food all summer, fattening up and filling their stores in order to prepare themselves for the winter. It was evolutionarily advantageous to store substantial amounts of fat, ignore our tummies when they told us we were full, and keep eating in order to maximize the amount of calories available to tap into when food availability was zilch.

Like a balloon our fat cells stretch to hold as much lipid as they can, but once they are maxed out, our bodies create more to increase our storage capacity. Herein lies the problem for homo sapiens living in our modern obesogenic environment: we can't get rid of the fat cells once we make them. A person losing excess weight has a greater capacity to hold fat, and like a bunch of deflated balloons, their fat cells will have higher elasticity, making it easier to fill them up the second around.

The take home message is this: if we don't focus our educational efforts and policy changes on mitigating childhood obesity, we will be faced with a generation of people who, for the first time ever, will have a shorter lifespan than their parents. Health care costs due to adult obesity are already skyrocketing; add another 30 years of complications per obese child into the equation and the collapse of our health care system could be in the forecast.

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