Why many of us cannot maintain weight loss ?

Existing studiesTrusted Source cited by Ross and colleagues had already shown that individuals who experience significant weight loss tend to put on between one third and one half of the pounds they shed within a year of their initial success.

The question that the researchers were interested in addressing, however, was how long it took for people to start regaining weight. Although they first believed in a “period of grace” in which people maintained their new weight before relapsing, the current study proved the researchers wrong.

The team worked with 75 participants who all completed a 12-week, Internet-based weight loss programme. Through this programme, the participants managed to shed 12.7 pounds (which is around 5.7 kilograms), or a pound (0.4 kilograms) per week, on average.

Following this weight loss achievement, Ross and her colleagues asked the study participants to continue to weigh themselves every day over a period of 9 months. They were able to do so from the comfort of their own homes with the help of “smart scales,” which were capable of relaying the data remotely “to research servers via wireless or cellular networks.”

The scientists note that, approximately 77 days from the beginning of the study, the participants started to experience weight regain, putting on approximately 0.15 pounds (or 0.07 kilograms) per week.

After approximately 222 days from the start of the programme, weight regain rate slowed down somewhat, with participants only putting on about 0.13 pounds (0.06 kilograms) each week.

Of the initial 75 participants, the researchers based their final analysis on the data sourced from 70 of them. The data from the other 5 participants were disregarded, as they were incomplete.