Losing weight helps you age slower — but only if you keep it off
Weight Regain Reverses Caloric Restriction-Induced Benefits on the Insulin-IGF-1 Nutrient-Sensing Pathway: Post Hoc Analysis From the CALERIE-2 Randomized Controlled Trial.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
When people eat less and lose weight, their body gets healthier and even looks younger on a biological level — but if they gain the weight back, all those benefits disappear.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
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Evidence Score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. Considered the gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
When people eat less and lose weight, their body gets healthier and even looks younger on a biological level — but if they gain the weight back, all those benefits disappear.
Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses
Max 100Randomized Controlled Trials
Max 90Cohort Studies
Max 72Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional Studies
Max 44Case Reports & Case Series
Max 30Expert Opinion & Narrative Reviews
Max 580 / 90
Evidence Score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. Considered the gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Publication
Authors
Warmbrunn MV, Yang L, Kishore Biswas R, Ryan CP, Harper A, Belsky DW, Fiorito G, Fontana L
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Claims (5)
In nonobese adults, losing and keeping off weight for two years can lower a biological age measure by 2–3 years, but regaining more than 5% of the lost weight eliminates this change.
In nonobese adults, maintaining weight loss lowers the ratio of IGF-1 to IGFBP-1, a marker related to how much active IGF-1 is available in the body, and this change is linked to reduced activity in cellular pathways involved in aging and metabolic disorders; when weight is regained, this effect is reversed.
When people return to their previous eating and activity habits after losing weight, their body fat tends to increase back to the level it was before the weight loss.
In healthy adults who lose 5–7 kilograms over two years, insulin sensitivity improves, the IGF-1 to IGFBP-1 ratio decreases, and biological age declines by 2–3 years. If weight is regained by more than 5% of the original baseline, these benefits are reversed. Maintaining the weight loss is necessary to sustain these metabolic and aging-related improvements.
After losing weight through dieting, nonobese adults who regain more than 5% of their original weight show higher insulin levels during a glucose test, suggesting their insulin sensitivity returns to pre-weight-loss levels, unlike those who keep the weight off.