this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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No, I don't. I'm just stating facts on how the human body works. With extreme willpower you might be able to counter this for a time, yes. But it will be a serious uphill battle, and the messenger chemicals from the depleted fat cells do not just stop because you will them to. You will just have to live in a state of perpetual raving hunger then. The few who can successfully overcome this for a significant time are rare, indeed.
I’m down 100lbs and been chilling there for a a while actually. (I do bulk/cut cycles of around 30lbs for bodybuilding so my total weight loss fluctuates from like 120lbs to 90lbs depending on how that’s going. Just for disclosure)
But I’ve heard a few people mention this idea that “fat cells stick around forever” and “send hunger signals to fill you back up”. Do we have a scientific source for this?
My other thing with it is like, that’s not the reason someone gets fat the first time right? Because the idea is your fat cells start multiplying after a certain weight? So regardless it still seems important to address that first cause and not repeat it
But for me personally I just haven’t really experienced it at all lol. I’ve found that actually the type of food I eat makes me hungry and more likely to go off track. Like any fast food, most prepackaged snacks and prepared meals from the grocery store.
Like I could eat an 800cal pint of ice cream then have dinner 45 minutes later. But 200 calories of frozen grapes and I’m like, stuffed lol. Or I’ve also noticed if I have a doughnut in the morning (work offers them) I’m hungry all day, but eggs cheese oats and yogurt leave me satisfied to the point where I’m not hungry at all when I get home, and eat just because I know I need the nutrition from dinner.
Anyway sorry for rambling, really I’m just curious to get to the bottom of the “depleted fat cell” thing. I had never heard of it the entire time I was losing weight/maintaining then all of the sudden I’m hearing it pop up in lots of places, even lemmy now
The "fat cells are multiplying" is normal when having surplus calories in the body. The "empty fat cells scream hunger" is something that was suspected basically for ages, but has finally be proven not long ago, the paper is less than half a year old. It had been referred to here on Lemmy, at least to a science or nature article that pointed to the paper.
Could you direct me to the paper where it was proven? There seems to be a notable amount of bad journalism and broad misrepresentation of the science on this topic.
We are basically discussing whether or not obesity is an inescapable condemnation, so we should not sensationalize the topic whatsoever, and we should especially not present it as a fact if it is not a fact
Found it. It was older than I thought, though: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08165-7
To be honest, reading thru the study and poking at some of the discussions about it online, it seems to not be remotely saying what people are saying it’s saying lol.
Like they weren’t able to find many of the results they expected in actual human samples compared to the mice. They also found that slower weight loss seemed to correspond with fewer and less severe epigenetic changes.
That second point there was never really expanded on beyond a throwaway statement, but it jumped out at me because the humans studied received bariatric surgery. Which causes massive weight loss very quickly. They even cited that as a potential confounding variable.
It’s also not really about “fat cells multiplying” at all, but rather how a collection of dozens of different factors differ between never obese and formerly obese samples, and only at the two year mark after a weight loss intervention.
Their own conclusion is that “they have not proven” their findings have anything to do with weight regain. This is then bizarrely and immediately followed by what can only be described as an unprompted advertisement for Ozempic, along with speculative musing that further study is needed to determine if it could be used to “erase or diminish” the epigenetic memory (despite semaglutide being unrelated to the experiments and appearing nowhere else in the paper?). Interestingly enough, there’s also an extant conflict of interest statement linking one of the researches to several pharmaceutical companies, including Novo Nordisk
All in all, it strikes me as nothing more than yet another case of bad science reporting. With people kind of going in with preconceived notions, glossing over all of the details, and emerging with snippets taken out of context (body remembers being fat! It changes your genetics!). Lo and behold all the online discussion centers around just the provocative headline and the speculative sections of the paper.
It seems like the researches even deliberately tried to use language to bait this type of response from the general public (although this is now just speculation on my part). In summary, I am unpersuaded by the available evidence. Thank you however for linking it! There is a lot of other interesting info in there
Righteous, thank you! I’m in the muck right now at work but I’ll give it a read when I can
Adipogenesis is actually pretty regulated by the body but can be encouraged by some things. Not hunger though - that causes adipolysis, aka less adipocytes.
Sadly, no. I sat down and tried to remember the title, but it won't come up. It is not old, two to three months at most, I'd say. I'm going to bed now, maybe it will pop up tomorrow. In that case, I'll update this.
Thank you, no rush! If so could you please reply in a new comment so I get a notification?