Research
Hormonal
Chronic exercise combined with weight loss increases circulating ghrelin levels and hunger, acting as a physiological mechanism to regain lost weight.
When you lose weight through exercise and diet, your body will naturally increase hunger hormones (ghrelin) to try to regain the weight. This is a normal physiological response. To maintain your weight loss, you must be prepared for increased hunger and adopt strategies to manage it, such as rearranging exercise intensity and duration.
ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
weight loss increases circulating ghrelin levels... Ghrelin increase among obese individuals after weight loss is possibly a physiological protection mechanism activated in order to regain the lost weight (with negative energy balance) with positive energy balance.
Why this rating
Based on a review of multiple studies showing consistent trends in ghrelin increase post-weight loss.
Source
Obesity, food intake and exercise: Relationship with ghrelin
Gül Tiryaki-Sönmez et al. · Biomedical Human Kinetics · 2015
DOI 10.1515/bhk-2015-0018
narrative_reviewCited 3×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- High-intensity acute exercise suppresses hunger and food intake, whereas low-to-moderate intensity exercise does not significantly affect appetite or food intake.Moderate
- High-intensity acute exercise suppresses hunger and food intake, but this suppression is not associated with a decrease in total ghrelin concentration.Moderate
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