Why Is Weight Loss Harder for Some than Others?

If you have excess body weight, the standard advice is to eat less and move more. Of course, we all know this is easier said than done.

For one thing, it takes a lot of work to change deeply ingrained habits and behavior patterns. It’s hard to move more when our workplaces are designed for sitting and our neighborhoods are designed for driving. It’s hard to eat less when you’re constantly surrounded by hyper-palatable food. It’s also challenging to eat less when you’ve learned to use food to cope with stress or soothe your emotions.

These are all issues that a good behavior modification program can help with. But It’s also really hard to eat less when your brain is sending you the wrong signals about whether you’ve had enough to eat.

If you have excess body weight, the standard advice is to eat less and move more. Of course, we all know this is easier said than done.

Hunger (the urge to eat or to seek food) and satiation (the feeling that you’re full and don’t want more food) are both regulated in the hypothalamus, the most primitive part of the brain. The hypothalamus responds to hormonal signals being sent from different organs of the body via various chemical messengers. When this system is working as it should, our hunger increases when our body needs energy and decreases when it doesn’t. The result is a stable body weight.

But sometimes, the system goes awry. Dr. Gabriel Smolarz is an endocrinologist specializing in the treatment of obesity. Here’s how he explains it:

"The hypothalamus is receiving all of these different inputs and processing the situation to then say: Should we eat? Should we not eat? Should we stop eating? We conclude that there's dysregulation when the gas tank is full, but the hypothalamus is indicating an empty tank."

If your brain is receiving the wrong signals about whether or not you need food, this is obviously going to make it much more difficult for you to eat less.

Are genetics to blame for obesity?

Dysregulation of appetite signals can be due to genetics—similar to the way you might inherit a dysfunction in your body’s ability to regulate your cholesterol levels or blood pressure. This may be at least part of the reason that obesity, like high cholesterol, runs in families.

Of course, our genetics haven’t changed that much in the last 100 years, while the incidence of obesity has skyrocketed. But genes aren’t always destiny. Sometimes they need an environmental trigger to...

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