Weight Cycling: The Metabolic Damage You Can't Ignore

As the year wraps up, many people are about to lose coverage for their weight-loss medications… yet most have no plan for what happens next. 

That uncertainty alone can set the stage for weight cycling, and that’s where things get tough on your metabolic health. In this episode, I break down exactly what weight cycling does to your body, why planning ahead with your medical team is essential, and the steps you can take now to stay steady through coverage changes. If you're facing a coverage change or simply want to protect your metabolic health long-term, this episode gives you a clear path forward.

Audio Stamps

01:34 – Why weight cycling is harmful and the importance of planning ahead if you're losing medication coverage.

02:20 – How calorie restriction triggers significant metabolic slowdown and why your body fights weight loss.

03:55 – The real health consequences of weight cycling beyond just the number on the scale.

06:35 – Why building muscle mass first can be more important than immediate weight loss for long-term success.

07:39 – Strategies for transitioning between therapies to maintain metabolic stability and avoid weight regain.

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

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Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I can't believe how fast this year is going by. I hope that you're having a good month of December. I feel like December is one of my favorite months. I celebrate Christmas and we have the Christmas tree up that whole month, and there's something so nice about coming down the stairs in the morning and the tree is on. My husband's amazing. He sets a timer so that the tree goes on before I come down. That is my version of him making a pot of coffee in the morning for me. Do you know what I mean? It's the tree being on, so I could say, I could say a million amazing things. But that is one where I'm just, it, it, it just, I'm so incredibly happy. This is a month that, while there's always a lot of stuff going on, I always make sure to take enough time to just literally enjoy some of these moments. Having the hot chocolate with my son looking at the tree. This is just for me, even though it gets dark so early. Things like that. I like to focus on. A candle being lit. The beauty, those warmer moments, because that's what really I think makes me not get depressed over this time of year. Alright, so today I want to talk about weight cycling because we're getting to that dreaded end of the year when so many people are gonna lose coverage for their medications. You might not have insurance coverage come January and. Many of you are not gonna talk to your doctor, you're gonna have no plan of what to do, and weight is gonna come back on, and I am making this episode here. To plead with you to get in touch with your medical team if that's the case, and make a plan now of what you're gonna do. There are other interventions, other medications, other things that you can do. Do not just go into it and I'm gonna figure it out. Horrible plan. And I wanna go through today why weight cycling is so harmful. I want you to imagine every time you're gaining and losing and gaining and losing. You get more and more biologic adaptation. So what is this? This is where your body, I want you to imagine as you're losing weight, especially if you're losing weight fast, we could go into several things what ends up happening is that your body inside, I want you to imagine that a red siren light goes over and it says, alert, alert, alert. We're starving. This isn't good. We're gonna die. And so what does it do? It wants to preserve energy. This is one of the things that happens. How do you preserve energy? You make what you have last longer. So you're not gonna have the metabolic engine that, that, that fire that's giving you all the energy, it's gonna become a lot less. You need to use what you have longer. So the metabolism needs to go down. One statistic that I got here from a recent course that I did, they said metabolic rate suppression occurs with calorie restriction, 22% at six weeks. 36% at six months. Let's recap that. That is almost a fourth of your metabolic rate is down by a month and a half in, and then half a year in 36% down. That should give you chills to the bone and this is validating to many of you that are hearing this because you say, I know that I keep having to work harder and harder and harder. I believe you. I always say I believe you'cause I know, I know the statistics behind it. So. That is the case. You can do things differently. The other statistic that I wanna tell you is some of you're gonna say, well, I have no option. It's just how it is. And your weight's gonna continue to go up and down and up and down. And I'm not talking about five 10 pounds. I'm talking about massive fluctuations. Okay? There are different shades of gray here. Okay? So your weight cycling, it increases your cardiovascular risk and visceral fat. This is really the sick fat, the one that is causing all the metabolic problems for you. It's not just that, oh, you regained weight, you have more visceral fat now. You become sicker and sicker and sicker. And I don't want this for you. There are real consequences to going up and down on these things. You really want to work with your physician to come up with a long-term plan. Long-term plans are not made all at once. You might be doing something right now and it's working and then that doesn't work and you try something else, but there are steps to it. There's a progression. When I was meeting with my physician here recently for my. Uh not annual checkup.'cause I see the doctor more than once in the year. But every so many months I see this physician and we talked through where I am right now. We did make an adjustment and then we said, okay, well if that adjustment doesn't give me X, Y, Z result, then in a few months, here's another thing we're gonna do. And here's the thing after that that we could do. Do you know why I am so? Not panicked with this road, even though it's been slow as can be with me, because I always know there's another lever on the back end to pull. I always know that, and it's not obvious it might present itself, but I am willing to keep checking in and do whatever it takes to make this a top priority. For you, I know that it's so unfair some of you that are listening in other countries where these medications are covered, you just have no idea what I'm talking about. So you're just sitting here like, what? This is sadistic that you know that suddenly someone's doing so great and they get their metabolic health back and suddenly these medications are getting ripped. It's a reality in the us. And so if that's the case, I really do believe that there are either monotherapies, single medications or cocktails of medications that could help you to not gain all the weight back because it's not about the weight. Your health likely, massively improved in some capacity, and that is the line I wanna maintain. It is not that I care if you would just, if you, if no consequence would happen, if the weight came back on, I would not care. But hearing these numbers and hearing what happens, you can see how it just becomes incredibly tough for you. One thing that I was looking at the other day online, Dr. To, she's another. Obesity medicine physician. I just love her work she made a comment on one of my videos where she just sees that the patients that come in with a low muscle mass, that they just, at some point they can't do it. That basically, it's just not something that the GLP one can overcome. And I see this too clinically. If I have someone come in. And they're just starting at too much of a disadvantage metabolically, I will work on that first with them before we work on weight loss. Now, this is annoying to people because remember, everyone's only obsessed with the number on the scale, but, but if you've listened to any of the previous episodes, you know that one out of four people, even if they're thin, can still have metabolic disorders. So that's not really the thing that we should be chasing. If the muscle mass is too low, I will work on getting that up first, and then I will work on fat loss. It's almost like at some point you run someone into the ground if you don't do this, and that's just one simple example, but I want things to be different for you. I want you to go talk to your medical team if you are in this position where you know that coverage or something is gonna happen coming up. And by the way, many of you will tell me, well. I have so many injections at home and I can probably get through till February or into March, but then you have no plan. This is the time that you figure it out. This is the time, not February 1st, in a panic when you've been out for two, three weeks. And then you wonder what can we do quick? A lot of these therapies, as you titrate down from one, you titrate the other one up. That is how you don't have these massive swings in weight. That is how you keep metabolically things under control. You don't just cold Turkey it and then suddenly a few months later, all right, let's just start another random therapy. The people typically that do the best are really getting a lot of help along this road. Okay, so I'm not gonna say it one more time, but I would really love for you this next year to have no more weight cycling. And to have stability with it, and I would rather that you lose less and keep that off than you losing and regaining and just like a hamster wheel going at it because something is going on. If that's the case, now, one exception I wanna give it is very common. Post bariatric surgery or just weight loss in general, that people will reach a certain lowest number, but that's not necessarily their optimal number. It looks like a regain quote unquote five, 10 pounds, but that's actually where their body likes to live. And they were really artificially doing weird things and restrictive to get down to that lowest number. But that's not really optimal for them. That is not a regain, okay? That's just your body figuring out where it wants to maintain, but it is not, you suddenly regaining. Everything that you lost. Alright, I'm gonna leave it there. I wanna ask you a big favor. If you're loving these episodes, please make sure that you give a review. I'm trying to get to 500, we're getting closer, so please leave a review if you can. I'll see you next week. I.