Anyone who has ever tried to get rid of their belly fat and thought they would be successful knows it: the yo-yo effect. For weeks you tormented yourself with lean food, exercised, and watched the scale display. But once you’ve just reached your goal of minus 10 or 15 kilograms, it doesn’t take long until your new pants and T-shirts are too tight again. You often end up weighing more than you did before the diet, which is frustrating.
It seems as if the body of overweight people has some kind of memory of the pounds it has lost and wants to regain them. Why is that so? Many scientists around the world are pondering this question in their laboratories. What they have discovered so far suggests one thing in particular: the answer is complex. Last week, a German-Swiss research team brought more clarity to the complicated processes. In the magazine Nature They report that adipocytes, i.e. cells in the fatty tissue of overweight mice and humans, actually develop an obesity memory. This is long-lasting and does not disappear even after a drastic reduction in body weight. The result, the researchers speculate: the kilos inevitably come back. “It’s not your fault!” says lead author Laura Hinte from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in an accompanying article Nature.
