Dieting won't change the number of fat cells in your body

Glamour Magazine

Scientists continue to search for the biological mechanism behind weight gain and loss and one of the cool new findings is that the body regulates the number of fat cells in your body, meaning that the 100 pound version of you would have exactly the same number of fat cells as the 300 pound version of you. According to The New York Times:

In a way, Dr. Flier noted, the discovery is a sort of back to the future moment. There was a time a few decades ago, before the current interest in how the brain regulates how much is eaten, when obesity researchers spent all their time studying and discussing fat cells. Investigators discovered that fat people had more fat cells than thin people and that fat cells shrink with weight loss and bulge with weight gain. Dr. Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University, who did many of the initial studies with humans, said he started because he could not understand why people who lost weight regained. "They should have been cured," Dr. Hirsch said. After all, he said, if you cut out a fatty tumor, the fat does not grow back. Why was fat lost from dieting different? The result was the fat cell hypothesis, a notion that obsessed researchers. Fat cells, the hypothesis said, are laid down early in life and after that, they can change only in size, not in number. When people lose weight and their fat cells shrink, that creates a signal to fill the cells again, making people regain. "We didn't know a lot about obesity, so that was what we talked about," Dr. Flier said.


Oh Science, you continue to titillate with the big fat knowledge. Does that change anything in our daily routine? Probably not, but it's possible that understanding more about the body's need for stasis can be the key to unlock the mechanics behind weight loss and gain. This revelation begs a lot of new questions: for instance, if you get lipo, does your body do a fat cell inventory and then start cranking out newbies? Because if so, Doctor 90210 is a lot more business savvy than we give him credit.