The weight comes back for a reason (and it isn't willpower)

Today’s letter

Why the weight keeps coming back, and the one breakfast change that helps

Years ago, when I was new at this, a woman told me she had lost forty pounds three separate times. Each time it came back, and a few extra pounds came with it. I remember what I was thinking while she talked, and I am not proud of it. My thought was simple: if you can lose forty pounds three times over, you clearly know how to do it, so the fact that it keeps coming back has to be a choice.

I never said that out loud to her. But I believed some version of it for longer than I want to admit… and it took a stack of studies like the one I will show you today to turn me all the way around. She was not choosing to gain the weight back. Her own body was dragging it back on, and she had been handed terrible advice about whose fault that was.

“Why can I lose it, but never keep it off?”

You have asked yourself that too, I think. And here is the first thing I want you to hear: you are not lazy, and you are not weak. You have lost the same weight two or three times over, which takes more discipline than most people spend in a year. The losing was never your problem. Keeping it off is where the fight turned unfair.

So you did what everyone told you to do. Eat less, move more. You ate the smaller portions and you logged the workouts, and for a while the scale went down. Then the hunger showed up and would not leave, the weight came back, and you decided the one who failed was you.

Here’s what gets me.

None of that was a failure of willpower. Your body was built to pull the weight back on, and nobody thought to warn you.

Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that came out this year.

Researchers at UT Southwestern took a group of mice and fed them a rich, high-fat diet until they were heavy. Then they put those same mice on a diet until every one of them was back to a normal weight.

Now came the part that matters. They gave the slimmed-down mice all the food they wanted, and right beside them they kept a second group of mice that had never been heavy at all, with the very same bowl of food in front of them.

What they found

UT Southwestern, 2026. Heyward et al., iScience.

The mice who had dieted (they overate)

Given the very same food as everyone else, the mice who had lost weight ate more than they needed and climbed right back up, past where the never-heavy mice sat. The drive to overeat was still running strong a month later.

The mice who never dieted (they held steady)

Same food, same full bowl, same open door to the kitchen, so to speak. The never-dieted mice simply ate what they needed and stayed put. What set the two groups apart was one thing: one of them had lost weight first.

The hunger came from the dieting itself, not from anything a single mouse was doing wrong.

In other words, once a body has lost weight, it appears to turn the hunger up and keep it there. It was mice in the study, but it is the same pattern women describe to me all the time. You are not eating more because you are weak. It is because a body that has slimmed down is a hungry body, and hunger like that does not give up.

Those mice did not have weak willpower. A mouse has no willpower to speak of. And still its body fought to reclaim every ounce it had lost. Yours is doing the very same thing, and that is not a character flaw.

So what is a body actually doing in the weeks after it loses weight?

It cranks up the hormones that make you hungry and turns down the ones that tell you to stop. At rest, it burns a little less energy than it used to. And it holds that setup in place for months, long after the diet is over, so the pull to eat stays loud even when your kitchen is full. This is not a whisper you can talk yourself out of… it is closer to a standing order the body will not cancel.

She never stood a chance against advice that ignored all of this. Neither did you, I would bet.

That is the part no one says out loud. The advice was written for a body that does not exist, and then you were handed the bill when yours behaved like a normal one.

Try this today

Tomorrow morning, build your first meal around protein, and aim for roughly 30 grams of it. That can look like two eggs with a cup of Greek yogurt, or a shake with a scoop of protein powder, or even last night’s chicken over whatever you already like to eat. You are not cutting anything out, and you are not counting a single calorie. All you are doing is putting the protein first, early, before the hunger has all day to build.

You cannot out-willpower a hungry body. But you can walk into the day already full, and let the biology work for you instead of against you.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

There is nothing magic in a plate of eggs. Protein just keeps you full longer than toast or cereal does, and fullness is the one thing a body fresh off a diet is missing.

The woman I told you about at the start kept the weight off in the end. She did not do it by wanting it more than the rest of us. Her way through was to stop fighting a battle she could never win, and to start working with her hunger instead of swinging at it.

You have not failed at any of this. The deck was stacked against you, by advice that had the biology backwards. There is still time to do this the way that actually holds.

So the next time the scale ticks up and that old voice starts blaming you…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. How many times have you lost the same weight and watched it come back? Just the number, nothing else. Hit reply and send it to me. I read every one, and tomorrow I will tell you the number that landed in my inbox most often.

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