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'Weight cycling'—when someone repeatedly loses and gains weight—can harm an individual's metabolism.
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Metabolism slows when someone loses weight, and when the person gains the weight back, it may not return to its previous level.
A famous study of contestants on the reality program "The Biggest Loser" found that after substantial weight loss on the show and a related slowdown in metabolism, their metabolisms remained suppressed even when they gained weight again in the years that followed.
There's a National Weight Control Registry, established in 1994, that tracks over 10K individuals who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for long periods of time, following their weight experiences via detailed questionnaires. A goal of the work is to understand why those people were able to keep the weight off and understand the health implications.
Research that looked at weight loss and weight regain, sometimes called yo-yo dieting, suggests that the age of the person going through these weight fluctations may influence how much fat they gain back—with older people gaining back more fat than they'd initially lost.
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