Healthy Weight Loss — Without DietingQ&A 8:
Can You Help Me Further Solve the “Mystery” of
Weight Gain?
If you are someone who has struggled with weight management,
you are very likely to have scratched your head at some point in
your life when you gained weight without any apparent rhyme or
reason. From a research perspective, the ease with which many people
gain weight can be explained by two basic factors: (1) the fact that
we’re human and (2) energy balance.
Let’s take the human part first. In the world of weight loss research,
you’ll find a long list of scientific terms that have been invented to
describe our humanness in managing our weight. Researchers talk
about “flexible cognitive restraint,” “reduced food disinhibition,”
and “decreased food cue susceptibility” when analyzing weight loss
patterns. But what do these terms really mean? “Flexible cognitive
restraint” means that we sometimes stick with our weight loss plan,
but other times we do not. When our thinking tells us to avoid a
certain food, sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t.
According to researchers, we need to be flexible in these situations.
“Reduced food disinhibition” means that when we violate our own
weight loss rules, we still don’t want to go crazy and eat everything
in sight. “Decreased food cue susceptibility” means that the mere
sight and smell of a food must not always lure us into eating it. All
of these terms are ways of describing our human nature—as human
beings, we not only take pleasure in our lives (including the pleasure
that comes from food) but we also make mistakes and feel over-
whelmed in some situations. The research on weight gain says that
weight gain is a natural part of our human experience. Sometimes
we gain weight easily simply because we are human!
A second factor in easy weight gain is energy balance—or more
precisely, the delicate nature of energy balance for many individuals.