How Your Biology Fights Weight Loss Maintenance with Paul MacLean

You’ve done it. You’ve lost the weight. But then something shifts. The hunger gets louder. Food becomes more tempting. The scale starts creeping back up. You’re doing everything right, yet your body seems to be fighting you at every turn. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and more importantly, it’s not your fault.

The truth is, after weight loss, your body launches a powerful biological response designed to bring that weight back. It’s not about willpower or discipline. It’s about survival mechanisms that were built for a world without grocery stores on every corner. Understanding what’s actually happening inside your body after weight loss changes everything from how you approach maintenance to how you talk to yourself when things get hard.

Join Holly and Jim as they sit down with Dr. Paul MacLean, one of the world’s leading experts on the biology of weight regain. You’ll discover why keeping weight off requires completely different strategies than losing it, what your metabolism is really doing after weight loss, and the science-backed tools that can help you succeed long-term despite your biology working against you.

Discussed on the episode:

• The powerful rubber band analogy that explains why your body fights to regain weight
• What’s really happening at the cellular level when you lose weight (and why it persists)
• Why the speed of weight loss may matter less than you think
• The controversial truth about whether metabolic adaptation ever goes away
• One scientist’s personal journey with weight struggle and GLP-1 medications
• The myth about starting with a “clean slate” after weight loss