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In January, you might want to compensate for overindulging during Christmas by exercising more or improving your diet. However, research suggests that 90% of people that do manage to lose weight, eventually get it back on.

This percentage shows that the many ways in which we have tried to tackle overweight in the past haven’t been that effective. From a scientific perspective it shows that there might be processes taking place after we lose weight that we don’t really understand yet.

So, what do we know? When you start a new diet, your metabolism initially drops. Because you suddenly consume less calories, your body responds by burning them at a slower rate. This could be an evolutionary response to prevent starvation – but what happens in the following weeks, months or years, is less clear. Does your metabolism continue to go down, maybe even more than it should, or does it bounce back?

Furthermore, there are many myths circulating: your metabolism should be higher in the morning (or is it evening?), and it is supposed to goes down with age. This would mean, that you wouldn’t be able to lose as much weight when you get older.

There might be processes taking place after we lose weight that we don’t really understand yet

However, published in scientific journal Science in August 2021, completely changed our thoughts on this “age myth”. It shows that between the age of 20 and 60 our metabolism remains as good as stable. Very early in life there is a massive increase, since children need a lot of energy for their development. After 60 there is a large drop, and it is thought that this drop can be linked to why we are more prone to diseases as cancer after this age. According to this study, these appear to be the only big changes in our metabolism.

Our metabolism is thus hard to shift – the reason that many of us put on some weight when we get older could have different reasons. Eating more highly processed and heavy food, being exposed to more stress, genetics, hormonal changes and lifestyle factors as sleep and smoking are all drivers of weight gain – rather than our metabolism slowing down.

The solution would be readdressing our relationship with food, and to seek for group support

Can we then jog off last week’s chocolate cakes? Unfortunately, studies show that it’s not that simple, and there is a deep evolutionary reason to this. In our world, burning more energy than we consume would be great, but in the wild that’s a bad strategy. walking up to 19,000 steps a day, for example, burn around the same number of calories as sedentary Western populations. When not used for exercise, calories will be used for processes like stress and aging.

According to scientists, the solution would be readdressing our relationship with food, and to seek for group support. On the plus side: this means we don’t have to feel guilty when we trade another workout for Netflix.