HomeScience and ResearchScientific ResearchThe Yo-Yo Effect? Your Brain Might Help Prevent Weight Gain After Dieting

The Yo-Yo Effect? Your Brain Might Help Prevent Weight Gain After Dieting

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Yo-yo dieting, also known as the yo-yo effect, is a prevalent condition where individuals face difficulty in sustaining their desired weight during weight loss programs. Initially, they may lose weight, but eventually, they regain the lost weight.

With each cycle, losing weight becomes increasingly difficult, even with strict dieting and vigorous exercise routines. This is because excessive fat and reduced muscle mass negatively impact metabolic function.

The yo-yo effect can have detrimental effects not only on the body but also on mental health.

A recent study conducted by Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research and Harvard Medical School researchers says that the findings of the new study could potentially help to alleviate the yo-yo effect.

“People have looked mainly at the short-term effects after dieting,” remarks lead author Henning Fenselau.

“We wanted to see what changes in the brain in the long term.”

These findings have the potential to guide the development of drugs that can prevent this amplification and assist in maintaining a lower body weight after dieting.

As they explain in their study, the nerve cells responsible for conveying the feeling of hunger receive stronger signals, causing the mice to consume more food and gain weight more rapidly after the diet.

The researchers put mice on a diet and analyzed the changes in brain circuits. They focused on a cluster of neurons called AgRP neurons, which regulate the sensation of hunger in the hypothalamus.

The study revealed that the neuronal pathways that activate AgRP neurons sent more robust signals when the mice were on a diet. This significant alteration in the brain persisted for a prolonged period even after the diet.

How to Prevent the yo-yo effect

By selectively inhibiting the neural pathways that activate AgRP neurons in mice, the researchers achieved a significant reduction in weight gain after dieting. According to Fenselau, this could potentially help to alleviate the yo-yo effect.

“This could give us the opportunity to diminish the yo-yo effect.

“In the long term, our goal is to find therapies for humans that could help maintaining body weight loss after dieting. To achieve this, we continue to explore how we could block the mechanisms that mediate the strengthening of the neural pathways in humans as well.”

They previously discovered a critical group of upstream neurons that directly synapse onto and activate AgRP hunger neurons. In this study, they observed that synaptic plasticity, the physical neurotransmitter connection between these two neuron groups, significantly increased with dieting and weight loss, resulting in long-lasting excessive hunger.

“This work increases understanding of how neural wiring diagrams control hunger,” points out co-author Bradford Lowell from Harvard Medical School.

Image Credit: Getty

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