Your Body ‘Remembers’ Being Fat—and That Makes Weight Loss Harder

If you’re trying and trying and failing and failing to lose weight, it might not necessarily be your fault. Well, the fault lies in your body, within your fat cells, thus making it your fault, but not really. Here’s why.

According to a study in Nature, fat cells have epigenetic memory, which is our experiences and our reactions to them that get buried deep within our genes and passed down through the generations. It sounds like pseudoscientific nonsense, but it’s not. Assassin’s Creed-style genetic memory, on the other hand, is complete nonsense.

The trauma your parents or grandparents experienced as they fled a war-torn country is getting passed down to you, not just in their attitudes and parental style, but through their DNA. The fears you accumulate throughout your life are being handed down to your children. The same goes for your weight.

Even after weight loss, the blobs of fat in your body, called adipose tissue, kind of become nostalgic for the days when they were fat. Researchers compared the fat of folks who’d never been obese to that of ex-obese people (post-weight-loss surgery). The formerly fat cells still acted like they did when the person was obese. Some genes were still overactive, still causing inflammation, still forming scar tissue. Others were underactive, hindering proper fat cell function.

And it’s not just humans. Mice who lost weight and then relapsed on a high-fat diet gained nearly three times as much as their never-obese brethren. Their fat cells also guzzled sugar and fat like they had never lost the weight.

This all tracks, from an evolutionary standpoint. Our bodies evolved to hoard weight. Back in the caveman days, thin meant you weren’t built to survive. Our ancient ancestors needed to store fat because who knew when they were going to get another meal.

But times have changed. Most of us nowadays know exactly what our next meal is going to be and when it’s going to happen, and we can even reject it when we think it sucks. Our bodies pile on fat like never before, and all that fat is leaving an imprint in our cells that pushes them to revert back to that state.

Losing weight is about a lot more than willpower. Your body is literally hardwired to drag you back into sweatpants. Maybe one day this research leads to anti-fat-memory drugs or more effective weight-loss strategies. Until then, be kind to yourself, and maybe stop blaming your lack of six-pack abs on laziness. It’s biology. Your fat is stuck in the past, man.