If you’re one of the many, many people who have adopted some sort of fad diet through their lives, you’ll know just how difficult it is to keep it up.

Understandably so, since restrictive eating for immediate weight loss is by its very definition unsustainable; it’s simply not practical to keep eating that way in the long-run.

And in the Western world, in which high-fat, high-sugar food is convenient, often cheaper and, let’s face it, delicious, temptation is everywhere too.

Inevitably the pounds start to pile back on after the restrictions have ended, leaving you potentially a little downhearted.

But according to researchers from the University of Rennes and Paris-Saclay University in France, this may not be the only effect of these drastic dietary changes on your body.

In a recent study by the research team, lab mice were fed diets that alternated between their usual food, and high-fat, high-sugar alternatives, with the latter designed to imitate the Western diet.

Over the course of a few weeks, the mice had their diet changed, with clear – and somewhat alarming – results in the aftermath when their behavior and gut bacteria were studied.

First of all, the researchers explained in their paper, which was recently published in the journal Advanced Science, the mice were more likely to binge-eat when they were switched onto the less healthy diet, suggesting that they were eating for enjoyment rather than hunger.

Second, and perhaps more shockingly, their gut bacteria changed considerably, with their metabolism actually shifting.

What’s more, the scientists transferred some of this changed gut bacteria to other mice who had only ever consumed standard food – and alarmingly, they started binge-eating too.

Incredibly, this study proved that – if the same alteration to gut bacteria occurs in humans – our yo-yo dieting is actually making us crave food more, since our gut bacteria is shifting toward a preference for binge-eating, as the researchers explain in their paper:

“Alternation between high-energy and standard diet durably remodels the gut microbiota toward a profile that is associated with an increase in hedonic appetite and weight gain. Weight maintenance during restrictive yo-yo dieting might be impeded not only by metabolic adaptations but also by modified food reward-related processes.”

In a world in which waistlines only seem to be increasing, such evidence is vital for understanding that weight loss needs to be tackled in a truly sustainable way.

Not only are fad diets demoralising, by giving dieters false hope followed by the blow of plateauing or even increasing weight when initial loss becomes unsustainable, they also seem to be training gut bacteria to desire binge eating in the aftermath.

It’s totally counterintuitive for those who want to lose weight, and potentially preventing those who are looking to maintain a healthy weight from doing so. Slow, sustainable, weight loss has to be the answer here.

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