What is the secret code to maintain a normal weight?

What determines who you are? Genes and the environment

What determines your weight? Genes and the environment

All our biological characteristics including height, eye color, and even some behaviors are genetically predetermined! Is it likely then that your weight is similarly genetically set? And therefore affects your weightloss diet?

The answer is YES…but the actual weight (height and behavior) you carry is the expression of those genes and most importantly your environment and lifestyle you lead. The high prevalence and persistence of obesity in spite of everyone’s efforts reflects the role of their genetic predisposition and environmental factors.

Weight Set Point





Through complex hormonal mechanism the body is set to maintain a given weight over a long period of time, until and unless a significant life event alters that. Some known events, including pregnancy, illness (including emotional trauma) and other upheavals of life, are known to trigger the alteration of weight-control mechanisms through hormonal and behavior mechanisms. Once the new weight is allowed to last sometime, it becomes a new normal for the individual and change is resisted by the body’s defenses.

Scientific studies have clearly shown how starvation, even for a brief period, induces hormones (insulin and leptin) that lead to increased feeding signals and the slowing of metabolism. And as soon as feeding resumes, insulin and other hormones work to restore the fat and weight loss!

It becomes easy to appreciate the fact that no single weight loss plan or tactic is known to achieve a permanent new lower weight probably because of the body’s natural hormonal and the central nervous systems which combine to restore the weight lost and negate the individual’s efforts.

This explains why most people who lose weight successfully end up regaining that weight. It is this tendency to revert back to original weight that gave rise to the “Weight Set Point” theory. Simply stated, Weight Set Point means that whatever weight is lost will be regained so as to restore the body’s weight to a previously set point, at which point the body appears to work harmoniously – this is its “comfort zone”!

The weight set point though set naturally by the body has nothing to do with your health and wellbeing settings! The wrong set point may be setting you up for disaster.

Though the Weight Set Point Theory sounds very natural and predetermined by our genes, its expression and settings are influenced by our lifestyle and environment! As Dr. Weinsier of the University of Alabama has argued, it is within our capability to influence the weight we carry by modifying the environment we live in by our own efforts. Indeed there are many scientists who argue against the existence of weight set point, in spite of the experimental evidence available.