Most of us have enough problems losing weight, but the regular fight of maintaining your weight loss is even more complex when you face the likelihood of gaining all of the weight back.

A new report recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine examines the claim that over 80% of dieters regain lost pounds within a year or two of losing them. Is this just a battle of wills, or is there a biological reason as to why we seem to gain those stubborn pounds back so easily?

Why is it so Easy to Regain the Weight?

The urge for our bodies to gain the weight back has a lot to do with hormones. These hormones actually encourage your body to eat more after you lose weight. Gaining this weight back can be very easy, especially if you embrace a very low calorie diet.

Biologically, once your body loses weight on this sort of diet, these hormones essentially tell your body to eat more, to conserve energy, and to store away more fuel as fat.

This is why so many crash diets and extreme low calorie diets fail to help you sustain lifetime weight maintenance. Eating the right diet, balanced with proper nutrition is essential, especially if you don’t want to regain all of the weight right back.”

Can Consuming More Calories Help?

Participants in this study were required to eat a strict diet of just 550 calories per day. Bottom line: the numbers on the scale will drop, but this isn’t a sufficient daily calorie consumption to promote long-term weight loss.

You need a certain number of calories per day in order to be healthy and to keep an active metabolism. Any diet like this, with just 550 calories per day, is putting your body at serious risk for nutritional deficiencies.

In order for your body to maintain an effective metabolism, it needs the right balance of nutrients. This includes complete meals with protein, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats.

If you want to maintain long-term weight loss and be healthy, you need to consume more than 550 calories per day. Our bodies are required to have a certain amount of calories daily. Again, this is why so many extreme low calorie diets fail—our bodies are trying to make up for the nutrition it’s been lacking for such a long time. It’s simply not a sustainable method. For weight loss, the ideal range is between 1200-1500 calories per day.

If you want to lose weight, and keep it off for good, just keep in mind: you need the right amount of calories, balanced with the proper amount of nutrition.

Christy Shatlock, Lead Dietitian, MS/RD