Obesity is high and holding steady in the U.S., but the proportion of those with severe obesity — especially women — has climbed since a decade ago, according to new government research.
The U.S. obesity rate is about 40%, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people. Nearly 1 in 10 of those surveyed reported severe obesity, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Women were nearly twice as likely as men to report severe obesity.
The overall obesity rate appeared to tick down vs. the 2017-2020 survey, but the change wasn’t considered statistically significant; the numbers are small enough that there’s mathematical chance they didn’t truly decline.
That means it’s too soon to know whether new treatments for obesity, including blockbuster weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound, can help ease the epidemic of the chronic disease linked to a host of health problems, according to Dr. Samuel Emmerich, the CDC public health officer who led the latest study.
The problem is that your fat cells will remain in your body ready to be refilled with lipids. It takes several years of maintaining a caloric deficit in excess of what your body Burns for your body to phage those cells.
As long as you have those cells, as soon as you eat above your caloric requirements they will greedily suck up and reabsorb the excess.
A formerly obese person whose body has not phaged their fat cells can regain weight exponentially quicker than a person who has not been previously fat but eats the same amount of excess.
It’s easier to refill the sacks than it is to make new ones.
People excrete their excesses above what the body can process, but obese and formerly obese people can process far more than non-obese people.
I’m on a diet right now and I’ve already been approved for lipo. Once I hit my target weight I’m just going to literally rip the fat cells out of my body so that if my body wants to get fat again it’s got to build new ones.
I will probably have to undergo liposuction two or three times to reduce my fat cells down to what they would have been had I not gotten overweight in the first place.
It’s not a perfect fix but I’m not a perfect person.
The mechanism you are describing about fat cells refilling vs making new cells, does not make sense. They have done studies, and the number of fat cells remain constant during adulthood, unless you undergo liposuction or other procedures. I think what you are describing is a set point weight, where your body tries (via hormones I think) to maintain its preferred weight. So its more a metabolism effect rather than physical space issue about storing fat.
https://news.yale.edu/2015/03/02/study-new-fat-cells-are-created-quickly-dieting-cant-eliminate-them
This information says otherwise, and there are other studies that also imply that obese people not only have more fat cells but also create more fat cells.
