Published research into what the body does after a diet has ended · Read this before you start again on Monday
No new plan. No stricter rules. A free five-minute check that shows which signals in your own answers speak loudest.
"I know exactly what I should be doing. I just can't stay away from it."
Say that sentence out loud.
You know how this goes. Standing at the fridge at ten in the evening. Wanting something sweet at night while you are already full. A second helping you never decided to take. Hungry again two hours after a full meal. Thinking about food while you are working. Standing eating in the kitchen without tasting it. Starting again on Monday, again. Emptying a bag you only wanted to open.
I am Jesse van der Velde. Not a guru and not a doctor. I study and share what published research says about how a body ages. I have been testing that on myself and with the people I guide for more than fourteen years.
What I hear a lot of people say is "I apparently just don't want it enough".
Because there is published work on what a body does after you have eaten less for a while, and it runs on for years after the diet has ended.
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Almost every guru says it: set goals. Make sure you are motivated.
Picture your dream body. Find your reasons why you want it.
The instruction is always the same: create more determination and healthier eating follows by itself.
That instruction has one problem. It says nothing about hunger, and hunger is the part that decides.
The instruction asks you to want something (your goal) even more than you are hungry.
But hunger is biochemical. It is measurable in a lab.
But that “wanting” is something you have to find in yourself that evening, on your own. And that is not easy. In fact, fighting that biochemistry turns out to be almost impossible.
In 2014, Gregory Morton, Thomas Meek and Michael Schwartz published a review article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.¹
What was studied: how what you eat and what you use up are kept in balance, and what happens when that balance is pushed aside.
How: an overview of the neurobiology, gathered around one distinction. There is a homeostatic system whose task is to keep the amount of body fat stable over time. So that system wants to maintain your body fat. As a neurobiological system for staying alive.
At the same time, there are what the authors call emergency circuits, which drive eating in response to urgent or stressful things.
These switch on your feeling of hunger. You “have to eat”, to maintain your body fat.
The findings: the homeostatic system can be pushed aside by those emergency circuits.
When those “emergency circuits” are kept quiet, when they are “at rest”, there is no strong feeling of hunger. No strong trigger to go and eat.
But if they stay “on” for too long, that can cause a drastic increase in body fat.
What the researchers explain in this study:
the body recognises a biologically defendable level of body fat.
Read that again. Not a weight you happen to have. A weight your body defends.
Now what that defending looks like in a laboratory.
In 1995, Rudolph Leibel, Michael Rosenbaum and Jules Hirsch published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine.²
What was studied: what happens to energy use when body weight is deliberately shifted, up as well as down.
How: 18 people who were overweight and 23 who never had been. Energy expenditure over 24 hours, at rest and in movement, plus the energy the food itself costs, was measured repeatedly at their usual weight, again after eating less had brought them 10 to 20 per cent below it, and again after eating more had brought them 10 per cent above it.
The findings: holding a weight 10 per cent or more below the starting point went together with a fall in total energy expenditure of 6 ± 3 kcal per kilogram of fat free mass per day in the group with no history of being overweight, and 8 ± 5 in the group who were overweight.
Holding a weight 10 per cent above that went together with a rise of 9 ± 7 and 8 ± 4. Both directions, in both groups. And the size of the change was not linked to how much fat someone carried, and not to sex either.
That symmetry is the point.
A body pushes back against a change in both directions, and here it did that in people who have never been heavy too.
So your body safeguards your current body composition.
Biochemically, it works against your goals. That is what makes changing your body so hard for many people.
But it is not impossible.
Does this sound familiar? Take the free check now.
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50 people, ten weeks, and a measurement again a year later. In 2011 Priya Sumithran and colleagues published a clinical study in the New England Journal of Medicine. 50 patients who were overweight followed a very low energy diet for ten weeks. Leptin, ghrelin, peptide YY, gastric inhibitory polypeptide, glucagon-like peptide 1, amylin, pancreatic polypeptide, cholecystokinin and insulin were measured at the start, after ten weeks, and again after 62 weeks. And also how hungry people said they were.³
13.5 kilos, and an appetite that went up. The average change over the ten weeks was 13.5 ± 0.5 kg. Leptin, peptide YY, cholecystokinin and insulin all fell (P<0.001 for each) and amylin fell (P=0.002). Ghrelin rose (P<0.001), as did gastric inhibitory polypeptide (P=0.004) and pancreatic polypeptide (P=0.008). Self reported appetite rose significantly (P<0.001).³
A year later, none of it had gone back. After 62 weeks leptin, peptide YY, cholecystokinin, insulin, ghrelin, gastric inhibitory polypeptide and pancreatic polypeptide were still significantly different from the start, and so was hunger (P<0.001).³
Here is what that means:
Twelve months after those ten weeks had ended, the measured hunger signal was still the signal they had during the diet.
Six years, and one result that points the other way. In 2016 Erin Fothergill and colleagues published a follow up measurement in Obesity on 14 of the 16 people from a television competition. At the end of that 30 week competition the average change was 58.3 ± 24.9 kg and resting metabolism had fallen by 610 ± 483 kcal per day. Six years later 41.0 ± 31.3 kg had come back, and resting metabolism was 704 ± 427 kcal per day below the starting point.⁴
Now the part that does not fit the easy story, printed at the same size. How much came back was not linked to how much slowdown someone had at the end of the competition (r = -0.1, P = 0.75). And the people who kept the most off after six years were in fact the ones with the most slowdown at that point (r = 0.59, P = 0.025).⁴
So the slowdown is real, and it left the outcome open. Anyone who tells you that your metabolism decided how this went for you is going further than this research went.
You know your own version of this. Let me give you an example from one of my clients.
Tuesday evening. Work done. Children in bed. And there they were, eating in the kitchen without having meant to. In other words: they had walked to the kitchen without thinking, and started eating.
Then they stood there for twenty minutes being angry at themselves, which took longer than the eating itself.
For years I passed judgement on that, with my clients too. I coached them on it. Said: you need to be more motivated.
What I understand now: this point came at week 6 every time, exactly as it did during the study. The moment the body starts to defend itself. Your weight is trying to keep itself where it is.
A judgement about your character gets you nothing. Nothing constructive comes out of it. You cannot try harder to be less hungry.
What your body is defending, and for how long, is measurable. Yours has not been measured yet.
1. Starting over on Monday, stricter this time.
Whether you start again is of course yours to choose, and starting again is better than giving up on yourself.
But be clear about what it does and does not do. A stricter version gets you a faster ten weeks. It does nothing about month twelve, and after 62 weeks, in that study, every hormone measured was still where the diet had put it, and so was the hunger.³
How you do it instead, I am going to explain to you.
2. Getting the bad food out of the house.
An empty cupboard takes away the option standing in front of you. That is worth doing, and it is something different from being less hungry.
What the study measured was appetite itself, and it went up and stayed up for a year.³ An empty cupboard has no effect on that number. It moves the moment to the shop.
3. Deciding that you have to want it more.
Here it is the target that is wrong, not the effort. In the laboratory study, energy expenditure changed in both directions, and that change was not linked to how much fat someone carried or to sex.² A response that also occurs in people who have never been heavy is not a character trait.
4. Blaming your metabolism for everything.
This is the same mistake in reverse, and there is just as little you can do with it. The measurement after six years found that how much came back was not linked to the slowdown at the end of the competition, and that the people who kept the most off were in fact the ones with the biggest slowdown.⁴ The slowdown is real. It is not the thing that decides.
Four moves, one shared problem: none of them starts with what is actually going on with you.
The advice you got from other people failed. You did nothing wrong. And it can go differently.
This is the heart of it. If a body defends a level in both directions, then "how much willpower do I have" is no longer the useful question.
The question becomes: what is my body defending, and what does that cost me on an ordinary day?
How often the craving for something sweet comes, and how strong it is. How much you move on an ordinary day. How often there is vegetable or fruit on your plate. What runs in your family. Whether anyone has ever said that a value was too high.
And the honest limit, which the scan prints itself: this is a risk picture, not a symptom score, and a blood test confirms it.
That is what the research made available. Morton and colleagues gave the defended level a name, and the circuits that cut straight through it.¹ Leibel and colleagues measured the defending in both directions.² Sumithran and colleagues showed that the appetite signal was still changed a year later.³ Fothergill and colleagues followed it out to six years and printed the result that makes it more complicated.⁴
What was missing: a way to lay your own answers beside it.
On one condition. That analysis has to be about you: your cravings, your movement, your plate, your family, question by question alongside what published research describes. A general list of willpower tips does not tell you which signals in your answers are the hard ones.
BioProfile has built that first step. A scientifically validated questionnaire, five minutes, free and with no account.
You answer questions about your movement, your food, your history and your cravings. After that you see which signals in your profile speak loudest, and what the research says about them. Not a medical examination. An analysis of your own answers. You use the outcome yourself, or you put it on the table with your doctor.
You do the free check. Five minutes, no account, and there is nothing to buy.
Even if you do nothing with it, you have traded "I apparently just don't want it enough" for an analysis of your own answers. That trade is worth five minutes.
And the next time you are standing at the fridge at ten in the evening, you will know what is being defended, and by whom.
Do it now, while this page is still open. Monday is coming either way.
Our scientifically validated questionnaire gives you answers
The scan is not a medical examination. It is an analysis of your own answers. If complaints persist, consult your doctor.
