#492: How Does Weight Cycling Impact Long-term Health?
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2023
⏱️ 66 minutes
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Summary
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About This Episode:
Losing at least 5% of one's initial body weight is associated with improvements in glycaemic control, blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and other positive outcomes. Due to these reasons, it is typically recommended that individuals classified as overweight or obese should engage in effective weight loss interventions.
However, despite the potential for clinically significant weight loss through these interventions, weight regain is a common occurrence. This can be attributed to a combination of low adherence to weight control strategies and compensatory physiological mechanisms that influence weight regain.
Consequently, this may result in a cycle of losing and regaining weight over the long term, which is commonly referred to as "weight cycling."
There are concerns regarding the potential harm to health and increased risk of chronic diseases associated with weight cycling. Some mechanisms have been proposed, such as the loss of lean mass during weight loss periods that is not regained when weight is regained. However, the evidence supporting the harmful effects of weight cycling on health is incomplete and many unanswered questions remain.
In this episode, we will examine the evidence published to date and draw evidence-based conclusions regarding the impact of weight cycling on long-term health.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to Sigma Nutrition Radio, the podcast where you get evidence-based discussions |
| 0:04.8 | about nutrition science and related topics in a level of nuance, objectivity, and scientific |
| 0:10.3 | accuracy that is sadly often missing from nutrition discussions nowadays. |
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| 0:47.3 | So for full details, check the link in the description box wherever you're currently listening, |
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| 0:55.8 | Now, on to today's episode. |
| 1:16.9 | Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon and of course alongside me is Dr. Alan Flanagan. Alan, how are you today? I'm very well. Thank you. I see that you are in the middle of |
| 1:22.9 | having a lot of salt. You're not eating much fiber these days. You're going low carb. What is going on? |
| 1:29.1 | Are you taking advice from the dark side? Yeah, I've decided that carnivore is self-evidently the best diet |
| 1:36.0 | for human health. So I'm eating state. Or at least for cutting weight for powerlifting competitions at the very |
| 1:41.0 | yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny, right, that those are those recommendations. Salt water and no veg, that's the key to health. If you want to rapidly |
| 1:51.8 | cut weight in a few couple of days. But speaking of reducing weight, but in a very different |
| 1:58.8 | manner, that brings us onto our topic that we're going |
| 2:01.2 | to discuss today, which is how does weight cycling impact long-term health? And this actually |
| 2:07.9 | fits in nicely with some previous episodes of the podcast that we have had, where we've discussed, |
... |
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