The science of weight loss – and why your brain is wired to keep you fat

When you lose weight, your body reacts as if it were a threat to survival. pexels/pavel danilyuk, CC BY

For decades, we’ve been told that weight loss is a matter of willpower: eat less, move more. But modern science has proven this isn’t actually the case.

More on that in a moment. But first, let’s go back a few hundred thousand years to examine our early human ancestors. Because we can blame a lot of the difficulty we have with weight loss today on our predecessors of the past – maybe the ultimate case of blame the parents.