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You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.

There's something we don't talk about much on LifeKit, and that's weight loss.

There are a lot of reasons for that.

One is, it feels like conversations around health and fitness can focus too much on losing weight when our physical health is more complicated than that. Also, this show is about a life well lived, and there's so

much more to that than how many pounds you weigh or how your body looks. That said, we felt like this

was the time to talk about it again.

Losing weight is a very common New Year's resolution, but it's complicated, and there are a lot of misconceptions about it.

For instance, often people think that, you know, if they just can make some lifestyle changes, some hacks of their metabolism or something like that for a period of time, and they can reach some goal weight that they might set out for themselves and then they can relax after that.

I think that what most people need to realize is that that's not how weight loss works.

If you want to maintain the weight that you might end up losing, then you're going to have to incorporate

those lifestyle changes permanently into your everyday life.

This is Kevin Hall. He's a nutrition and metabolism researcher, formerly at the NIH.

He studies weight loss specifically. And he says another thing people tie strongly to weight loss

...