If you’ve ever sworn off carbs, only to end up in an ice cream binge a month later, you know what it’s like to yo-yo diet. The constant back and forth between depriving yourself of everything you love and overindulging on all of it.
According to new research from France, this eating pattern is affecting your waistline, and it may be disrupting your gut and brain.
Scientists from the University of Rennes and Paris-Saclay University published a study in Advanced Science that provided mice with a complete “Western diet” experience: alternating between fatty, sugary food and healthier fare over several weeks. In other words, mice got to experience the agony and ecstasy of one week of salads and smoothies, followed by a weekend of pizzas and fried chicken buckets.
What is Yo-Yo Dieting?
They found that the mice on this diet rollercoaster started binge eating junk food the moment they were able. Not such an unusual finding. We do that too. But here’s the weirder part: even the mice who didn’t yo-yo but were implanted with gut bacteria from the yo-yo group started pigging out on junk food too.
This suggests that trendy juice cleanses or fad diets everyone’s jumping on might be rewiring your gut microbiome in ways that make you crave junk food later. It’s rewiring both your brain and stomach. Researchers have even observed mice eating when they were not hungry. They were doing it for the pure pleasure of eating, to trigger those happy little responses that delicious fatty foods set off in your brain.
Yo-yo dieting may be forming a formidable tag team between your gut and brain that can undermine your healthy eating habits.
This type of research needs to be scaled up to humans to determine if it has the same effect on us. However, it does provide a little explanation as to why we often revert to unhealthy foods after a brief period with a new fad diet. The swings are too extreme for our fickle little gut bacteria.
Some manageable and more realistic gradual dietary shifts seem like the best approach.
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