Why do I gain weight post a holiday so fast?

Why cant I keep my weight off?

I always get messages from concerned clients going on holidays about gaining all the weight back that they have lost.

Clients also always ask me to give them a ‘holiday meal plan’ and in my mind, I am always thinking that there is no need for the same. If you have made lifestyle changes and are eating healthy 80% of the time, the 20% of the year you are traveling will not ruin your progress.

Almost always, my clients come back from their vacations and have not gained any weight at all. This is without following any ‘holiday diet’.

But what about people who gain weight post-holidays?

If you reflect on your past, you will find that everything depends on how you lost weight in the first place.

If you lost weight through restrictive dieting and overtraining, chances are you will gain weight fast once you stop with your regime. This is because your body develops insulin resistance in the process of trying to lose weight too fast.

Insulin resistance is a hormonal fluctuation that drops your metabolism and slows your body down.

Therefore, a fad diet is a big NO when you're planning to lose weight.

Wellness tip for the day

Unfortunately, aside from the negative impacts on your hormones, fad dieting can also cause negative food associations and a bad body image.

Fad diets (extreme calorie restriction or cutting down on important food groups- such as carbs) are unsustainable in the long run. Your metabolism slows down, which means you don't burn food as quickly as you used to. As a result, you're more likely to gain weight than you were before the fad diet.

Taking the first step of choosing the right pathway to weight loss is very important. When it comes to fat loss, choose lifestyle changes over diet. Here is a video I made to help you understand the same:

Fad diets may help you lose weight instantly, but studies suggest that it primarily only reduces water weight. Your muscles store three grams of water for every gram of energy stored. As a result, when you're in an energy deficit due to calorie restrictions, your muscles lose water quickly. It’s not really ‘fat loss’.

What does science say?

Studies show that fad diets have become famous for decades due to cultural and peer pressure to have a specific body type. They promise rapid weight loss, but they have several disadvantages.

Keto diet, Atkin’s diet, low-calorie diet, carb- free diet, high protein diet are all fad diets. Here are a few articles I have on the same topic.

Trust this helps,

Roshni Sanghvi.