Yo-Yo Dieting: Why Fads Fail Us
I’m sure you’re aware of diet culture. Its prevalence has pretty much consumed the fitness industry and even the athletic community.
But not ALL dieting is created equal. What’s key is understanding the approach, reason, and process of your diet. Without this, don’t be surprised if your diet fails to live up to your expectations. You’re likely to fall into the trap of Yo-Yo dieting, which may leave you worse off than you were to begin with.
What is Yo-Yo Dieting? To understand this, we first need to differentiate “diets”. Generally, there are 2 ways of approaching a diet:
1) The diet is a lifestyle practice of regulated food choices to decrease, maintain, or increase body weight or physiological features.
2) The diet is used to restrict food, or special kinds of food, to lose weight.
The distinction here is important. Diet 1 simply describes managing your nutrition goals, like daily calories and macronutrients, to achieve an intended outcome, which may not be specific to weight itself. Diet 2, however, is the strict manipulation of food simply to lose weight.
This strict manipulation is the root cause of the Yo-Yo effect. Why? Because Yo-Yo Dieting doesn’t describe the diet itself. Instead, it’s the failure of your diet. It’s the fact that the diet failed to keep the weight off. A true diet, like Diet 1, offers a sustainable lifestyle where people learn to adapt their food choices to keep weight off, for a year or longer. Diet 2, or what we typically see in fad diets, offers only a short-term period of weight loss with no long-term expectations. At no point are food behaviors addressed, meaning results aren’t maintained once the diet is ceased.
And while there is no standard definition of Yo-Yo Dieting, which makes research difficult (we’ll get there later), I think we all get the idea. Yo-Yo Dieting is the repetition of weight loss, weight regain, weight loss, regain, loss, re… you get it. That’s why Yo-Yo Dieting is so common among fad diet users. The fad diet stimulates weight loss, likely in an unhealthy way, but then facilitates weight regain once the user’s original diet is resumed. THAT is the true culprit of Yo-Yo dieting, the fact there’s no lasting influence on habits or lifestyle choices to keep the weight off.
But, the idea of Yo-Yo Dieting could also be understood in the context of athletes. You might wonder how, but think about how people might cycle their weight.
Regular People – Generally, this population use fad diets to lose weight, then see weight regain once the diet is stopped. They might only Yo once, but they bounce back all the same.
Athletes – Many in the athletic population DO weight cycle, and it occurs between seasons, weeks, or based on their competition calendar. The difference, however, is their approach, reason, and process. Athletes will generally approach the diet by making small changes in their food choices – add a serving of protein to lunch or remove a high-fat snack after dinner. Their reason is performance-based, and NOT simply related to the number on the scale. Finally, the process is NOT EXTREME but, rather, calculated. Additionally, athletes like bodybuilders cycle weight, but their weight regain is controlled in order to facilitate muscle growth. This, again, differs from a typical Yo-Yo Diet because there’s no cessation of the “diet”, it’s simply just manipulated to facilitate further performance-based features.
For today’s discussion, our focus will be on Yo-Yo Dieting related to fad diet cessation. Unstandardized definitions of Yo-Yo Dieting have described it as “weight loss of >5 kg (or 10 lb) at least 2 or 3 times followed by weight regain” for mild and severe cases, respectively. So, if that sounds like you, maybe we need to consider a new approach to weight loss.
Why does the Yo-Yo Effect occur?
Like I said earlier, the Yo-Yo effect is due to rapid weight loss through restriction, followed by weight regain due to diet cessation. BUT, what factors play into this?
1) The Food Environment – When a fad diet imposes significant restrictions on food choices and calories, your perception of food is going to change. These restrictions will increase your perceived reward value of food, AKA all that yummy food you cut out is going to appear more rewarding and comforting than it did before. As a result, once the fad diet is stopped, you’re more likely to overeat these foods, which exacerbates weight regain. Additionally, your hunger hormones, i.e. leptin, ghrelin…, will encourage eating to establish homeostasis in an attempt to balance out the restrictions it just experienced.
2) Fat Overshooting – Weight loss is not specific. You lose fat AND lean body mass, like muscle, during weight loss. Unfortunately, weight regain will always favor fat storage, unless muscle-growing strategies are used. This explains why Yo-Yo Dieting can be so detrimental to health. With each “Yo” regain, a dieter may increase their absolute fat mass (total fat on their body) and relative fat mass (percent of fat) compared to before if appropriate interventions to focus on muscle growth isn’t utilized. As a result, dieters end up worse off than they were before the diet. As the cycle repeats itself, an individual can see significant negative changes to their body composition as muscle is lost during weight loss and a higher proportion and total fat is gained during the weight regain.
3) Energy Expenditure – Yes, dieting can have an effect on energy expenditure, it’s just more impactful with fad diets. Why? Because they don’t help the dieter account for the changes post-weight loss. Severe calorie restriction causes metabolic changes that reduce your body’s willingness to burn calories. It’s trying to preserve energy simply because it’s not getting enough. This reduces ALL components of energy expenditure – energy for digestion (AKA, thermic effect of food), activity-induced expenditure (both non-exercise activity and exercise), and resting metabolic rate – which ultimately impairs long-term weight loss maintenance. How? Once the fad diet is stopped and you resume eating as you did before the diet, your calories consumed are substantially higher than calories burned, promoting weight regain.
I’m hoping these points illustrate not just why Yo-Yo Dieting might be detrimental, but why the diet itself is to blame. The “Yo” is only the consequence of the diet as your body tries to find balance. The danger of which is only fully realized when we understand the negative health issues related to these factors.
What Negative Effects are Associated with Yo-Yo Dieting?
As fat accumulates and metabolism stalls with each Yo, a fad dieter is at greater risk of developing chronic diseases. Weight cycling has been associated with increased risk for diabetes and developing cardiovascular issues. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to understand the full effect because the definition of Yo-Yo Dieting/Weight Cycling is not standardized for research. Even without a standard definition, however, studies still show an association between weight cycling and metabolic-related diseases.
Theories for Why do Weight Cyclers Develop Metabolic Disease
There are 2 ideas that explain why people who weight cycle can be at an increased risk for disease: (1) Repeated Overshoot, and (2) Visceral Energy Partitioning.
The Repeated Overshoot hypothesis describes the progressive weight gain with each “Yo”. Here’s an example: A Yo-Yo dieter starts at 200lb and drops to 180 lb. Their weight regain adds an extra 30 lbs (more than their loss), so they’re higher than they were before. With 2-3 cycles, their weight regain can add 30 lbs simply from their attempt, and failure, to diet. It also appears that the stress imposed on the body by weight regain is likely not compensated for by the weight-loss period. Simply put, just because there was a period of weight loss doesn’t mean those benefits are still helpful post-weight regain. Thus, as regain overshoots your pre-diet weight, the dieter increases their risk of developing insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and abnormal levels of fat in the blood.
Visceral Energy Partitioning describes how fat and muscle accumulate in the body during weight regain. First, we know fat is the preferred storage method unless strategies for muscle growth are used. Unfortunately, it also appears fat accumulation may occur in a specific region of the body. Research has found an association between weight cycling and a greater hip-to-waist ratio, indicating that the weight may be accumulating around the torso. This means weight cycling may increase abdominal obesity, which further increases the risk for disease. This form of fat storage is associated with greater disease risk because the fat is stored around your organs, instead of the muscle (for energy), reducing organ function. This explains why the functionality of metabolically-related organs, like the pancreas, can be impacted by weight cycling.
It’s important to note that studies indicate that normal-weight individuals are MOST affected by weight cycling. Since their proportion of lean mass-to-fat is higher, generally, their subsequent weight regain is more disproportionately fat, leading to greater damage to the body. This means normal-weight dieters should be especially careful NOT to push the limits and fall into the weight cycling trap.
Together, these hypotheses help explain WHY Yo-Yo Dieters can be at a greater risk for disease.
Alright, What Can We Do?
It’s hard, but we need to refocus our lifestyle. It’s understandable for everyone to fall into the fad diet traps, hell I’ve done it myself. Especially with all the Instagrams, TikToks… we’re exposed to too many poor examples of the “right” body image. Remember though, we can’t expect to look like someone else when we aren’t living their life. We have to work within our own lives if we really want to be successful.
So, how can we address weight cycling? How about we stop allowing WEIGHT to be the sole definition of your health and fitness. IT’S NOT THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS! By changing our priorities to performance, we can refocus our goals to what our body is capable of. And in that pursuit to perform better, guess what, you’ll probably lose weight. Or you’ll learn the right way to approach weight loss. We will also relate our health and fitness to factors practical to life, as opposed to using an arbitrary number that simply measures mass.
If weight loss HAS to be a goal of yours, be SMART about it (like SMART-Goals smart). Make realistic goals. Use an appropriate strategy – nothing too much, too fast. But that’s a topic for another day.
So, before you prepare for Spring Break or Summer with a new diet book, consider the impact it might be having. Hell, you’re probably better off slowly losing weight over the next year. That way, you can guarantee that your “summer look” can be an EVERY summer look and not a one-off.
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Works Cited
Rhee EJ. Weight Cycling and Its Cardiometabolic Impact. J Obes Metab Syndr. 2017;26(4):237-242. doi:10.7570/jomes.2017.26.4.237
Montani JP, Schutz Y, & Dulloo AG. Dieting and weight cycling as risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases: who is really at risk?. Obesity Reviews. 2015;16:7-18.
Contreras RE, Schriever SC, Pfluger PT. Physiological and Epigenetic Features of Yoyo Dieting and Weight Control. Front Genet. 2019;10:1015. Published 2019 Dec 11. doi:10.3389/fgene.2019.01015
Dennet, CD. Overweight/Obesity: Potential Perils of Weight Cycling - Today's Dietitian Magazine. May 2017, www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/0517p18.shtml.
