Losing weight is hard. Here are 5 things to keep in mind
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Failure to shed pounds is often not about lacking the willpower to make important lifestyle changes, such as eating healthier, reducing calories and increasing physical activity. The dirty little secret is that our bodies are programmed by evolution to hold on to fat.
If you think it’s hard to lose weight and keep it off, you are not alone — and you are also 100% correct. Long-term weight loss is really difficult to achieve, studies have found.
Estimates vary, but it’s believed that more than 80% of people who lose a substantial amount of weight regain it within five years.
But failure to shed pounds is often not about lacking the willpower to make important lifestyle changes, such as eating healthier, reducing calories and increasing physical activity. The dirty little secret is that our bodies are programmed by evolution to hold on to fat.
“We evolved not to lose weight intentionally,” paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on the podcast Chasing Life. Lieberman, a professor and chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, studies why the human body looks and functions the way it does.
“All animals need some fat, but humans have evolved to have exceptionally high levels of fat, even thin humans,” he said. “And so we are under exceptional sort of biological pressure, always, to put it on and keep it as long as we have it, for when we need it.”
Humans are fundamentally adapted not to be happy or healthy but rather to be reproductively successful, Lieberman said. And for that, we need fat, a lot of fat — which is why Lieberman calls humans “an unusually fat species” compared with other mammals, even other primates.
“We have these big brains, which cost a huge amount of energy. … It’s 20% of our metabolism,” he said. “And a baby, when it’s born, half of its energy is paying for its brain. It needs a lot of fat. So … human babies are born very fat because they have to have that energy to make sure that they can keep their brain going.”
