Comment by bsder
3 years ago
> But then I hit a plateau (a high plateau, not a low one) where I was unable to drop weight no matter how low I cut my calories.
Fat cells "remember" their metabolic environment when they were created--ie. they "remember" your weight and fight you when you try to reduce it. It's one of the problems with dieting to large weight losses.
It is somewhere around 3 years for a fat cell to die off and be replaced. You probably need to "hang out" at the plateau weight for a bit until the fat cells that remember you being heavier die off.
I thought you never lose fat cells, they only shrink? Got a citation for that assertion?
It's been a while. IIRC, it was from an article discussing the fact that radioactive fallout allows critical measurements of cellular lifetimes and that in about 25 years the fallout levels will be too low to do the experiments. I'll see if I can cough it up.
Sorry, medium link: https://prosetech.medium.com/what-nuclear-bombs-tell-us-abou...
> The carbon-14 fat-cell study also revealed that fat cells don’t last forever. Fat or thin, your body replaces roughly 10% of your fat cells every year. If you have more fat cells to begin with, you’ll have more fat cells to replace.
I can't seem to find the study talking about how fat cells remember the chemical environment when they are created.
Interesting, thanks for the links and info!