Hormonal
Diet-induced weight loss triggers persistent physiological adaptations—including reduced energy expenditure and altered appetite-regulating hormones—that actively promote weight regain, making long-term maintenance difficult without compensatory behavioral strategies.
Expect your body to fight back after you lose weight. Your hormones will change to make you hungrier and burn fewer calories. This is biology, not a character flaw. To succeed, you must adopt rigid behavioral strategies (like high self-monitoring, regular exercise, and low-calorie diets) to counteract these physiological drives, as willpower alone is insufficient.
Diet-induced weight loss is accompanied by several physiological changes which encourage weight regain, including alterations in energy expenditure, substrate metabolism and hormone pathways involved in appetite regulation, many of which persist beyond the initial weight loss period.
Why this rating
Based on a comprehensive review of human studies and meta-analyses, though it is a review paper rather than a single RCT.
Source
The defence of body weight: a physiological basis for weight regain after weight loss
Priya Sumithran et al. · Clinical Science · 2012
DOI 10.1042/cs20120223
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