In the early 1990’s, low fat foods became very popular. When food manufacturers take out fat, they have to put something back in to replace it and make the food more palatable. What food manufacturers put back in was carbohydrate. By replacing the fat with carbohydrate, the food became a higher glycemic food. When you take in more higher glycemic foods, your hunger increases. Because there is no fat to slow gastric emptying to make you feel full, the effect on blood sugar is much more.

The end result is more stored energy. How does your body store excess energy? Yes, it stores it as fat.

Compound the low fat phase with the increase in fast food consumption and the “Super Size” craze, and we have a whole population of people taking in two to three times the number of calories that they need. Now let’s look at what happens after you put on excess weight in fat. Recent research presented at the ninth annual Conference on Obesity, sponsored by the University of South Florida, revealed that as the amount of fat goes up, the amount of leptin, a hormone that regulates hunger, goes down.

Now, you would think that as you lose weight, the leptin would go back to normal, right? Wrong. The leptin does not go back, and that is why people tell me that they “just cannot seem to fill up.” Obese people also have the set-point theory working against them. The set-point theory is relatively simple to understand. Your body always works to preserve itself. So, if your body is used to functioning at a higher weight, after you lose weight, it will always try to get back to the higher weight. That is why obese people can lose and gain and then lose and gain multiple times over their lifetime.