Small Portions and Weight Regain after Dieting

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March 19th, 2012 

Author: Joel Greene

Quick Summary: Losing weight with strict small portions can make you fat over the long term. 

Since 2009 the VEEP Nutrition System has included specific meal patterns to compensate for weight regain after weight loss.

These meal patterns are designed to minimize hormonal up regulation by gut hormones like ghrelin. Diets and dieting, particularly diets that rely on strict portion control of small portions, or cutting calories below a maintenance level, tend to create a hormonal counter measure.

Ghrelin is a gut hormone that plays a role in what is known as energy homeostasis. In simplest terms, energy homeostasis means how much you eat vs how much you burn. 

The hormones controlling food intake, like ghrelin, become sensitized and 'activated' from dieting and constant intake of small portions. The net effect is that once the weight is off you wind up eating more.

In effect, the body adapts to weight loss and portion control over the long term by making you eat more and eat larger portions. Not only do you gain the weight back, but next time around the weight is harder to lose. 

In simplest terms, dieting makes you fat because the body is wired to defend its weight over the long  term via a complex array of hormones that control your eating behavior. 

The question then becomes, "how do you lose the weight and minimize gaining the weight back?"

The absolutely astounding thing to consider is that apart from The VEEP Nutrition System, no other weight loss program, either online weight loss programs or any other, even mentions this problem, much less does anything about it, Perhaps one reason is that the research highlighting this problem is just now coming out. Interestingly, VEEP has specifically dealt with this problem for over 3 years in the exact method the research now points to. 

New research out of the Tel Aviv University, just published in March 2012, shows that ghrelin compensation from dieting can be minimized with specific meal pattern protocols. Long time users of VEEP will recognize these protocols. Many VEEP users are stunned to look at certain meals that seem to break all the rules of dieting and weight loss -huge meals with lots of carbs, even sugary carbs.  These meals are not designed for weight loss but as counter measures to the bodies weight loss rebound effect.  In the Tel Aviv study, these types of meals are shown to prevent hormonal compensation and weight regain from dieting due to ghrelin upregulation.

These types of things have never been done in any kind of diet program until we did them with VEEP.  VEEP is representative of the new picture of total weight control emerging from the latest research. 

In this emerging picture, simple diet rules simply don't work over the long term because unique foods exert unique effects. Further, eating in the real world requires specific solutions to specific diet situations. 

If you think about it, the problem with small portions as a way of life is that for thousands of years, humans have never eaten like that.  Feast and famine is something the body is well equipped to deal with. For thousands of years humans have dealt with starvation and then feasting.  

As shocking as it sounds, large portions serve a critical function for weight control. This is why we have built periodic large portions into the VEEP Nutrition System. I will cover this topic at length in a later article.  If you are curious about VEEP take our free assessment and get started learning how to use real food in real situations for real lasting results.