On a recent Modern Wisdom podcast Chris Williamson was interviewing Daniel Liberman about the many diets in American culture and the pros and cons of each.
In the podcast it was discussed that fat tissue “remembers” how fat they are and how that memory results in the regaining of weight after a period of weight loss. Researching this idea with Claude returned this:
A 2024 Nature study using single-cell sequencing found that both human and mouse adipose tissue retain cellular transcriptional changes after substantial weight loss, and mouse adipocytes show persistent epigenetic alterations that impair their function and response to metabolic stimuli. Practically, that means fat cells that were once “obese” don’t fully reset after you lose the weight – mice carrying this obesogenic memory regain weight faster when re-exposed to a high-fat diet, and the memory predicts how their gene expression will misfire in response to future overfeeding.