Why does diet rebound occur?

People return to old eating and exercise (or non-exercise) habits. I gain weight in the winter when I’m not riding my bike and running like I do in fair weather.

Yep, I’ve ‘yo-yoed’ a few times in my 50 years. Have been in peak condition and then gone soft, really soft, gained a bunch of weight and then gotten back on the wagon.

It is deceptive as hell sometimes. You drop off the diet and exercise and WOW…a few months go by and you arn’t gaining, it’s all good, ‘piece of cake’ haha and THEN…BAM! practically overnight the scale shoots up 10, 12, 20 lbs! It takes CONSTANT attention for most of us!

I lost 80 lbs and kept most of it off for 7 years. Put about 20 back on and I’m in the process of working on that now.
I think people have a lot of reasons for gaining the weight that they don’t always understand.
One thing I discovered about myself was that the fat was a sort of insulator. It made me almost invisible and people didn’t pay as much attention to me. In an insecure way, I liked that. When I’m thin, I get more attention and I think people expect more from me. Being invisible has it’s advantages.
Until I acknowledged my fears, I was not able to address the weight.
I also had to be willing to dispel other myths I had about myself.
I am not an athlete,
I am a volume eater,
I have a slow metabolism,
My hormones are off balance.
Once I committed to changing my lifestyle, regardless of the barriers, I was able to keep the weight off.
Do I slip up? Of course I do. Difference now is that I don’t beat myself up, I just get right back on track.
Even a butterfly crawls around like a caterpillar every once in a while. It doesn’t mean they give up flying forever.

Your set point urges you back to your comfort zone of weight.

If you deprived yourself of food you love on your diet, when you start eating them again, you can even shoot past your starting point.

They go back to eating like they did before the diet, or eating as many calories as before even if the food is a little different. A certain number of net calories (calories taken in minus calories burned) equals a certain weight, doesn’t matter how tall or short you are. If a person wants to stay down at 120 they need to continue to eat 1600 calories a day (making the number up right now). Some people think the reduced calories are only for losing weight, but it is for maintaining the lower weight also.

The answer is a little more complex than that. Science has been trying to figure out if our bodies have a set point, a weight that our bodies fight to get back to when we go below that weight. Also, our old habits are hard to break. Food can be like an addiction, so there are physiological and psychological reasons.

A diet is for life, forgetting that is the issue. If you think of it as limiting your caloric intake for a few months and then go back to what you regularly eat…