Question: Why and how do I gain fat? 

Answer: You probably know the fact that if you eat more and move less you will gain weight. And you know that this jump on the scales is not due to the increased firm muscle mass. When you take in more calories than you expend, they get deposited as fat and this may occur in two different ways. Just like muscle, fat cells may multiply in number (hyperplasia) and expand in size (hypertrophy). Scientists have found that hyperplasia occurs mostly in childhood when all the number of all cells increases in the growing body.

Hypertrophy, on the other hand, is more prevalent during the adulthood when the number of fat cells has already been set up and predetermined and now all the additional energy gets deposited into these prepared storage compartments. When you lose weight, you simply shrink your fat cells, but their number stays the same. The reason why it is so easy to gain weight back after being on a diet is because all the existing fat cells are still there, sitting in your body, starving and waiting for every opportunity to fill up.

Some other studies indicate that putting on fat happens when fat cells increase in size and number at the same time. Your fat cells have some kind of maximum size potential. When you fill them up and continue to eat more than you need, the new fat cells start forming in order to meed the energy storage demands.

This means that getting more calories than you need stimulates the creation of new fat cells which can also increase in size if you let them. Unfortunately, these will also grab every chance to get as much fat as they can whenever they have the chance, or every time you overeat. While diet and exercise may help you downsize your hypertrophied fat cells, the potential problem with multiplying fat cells is that there is no known method of reducing their number other than liposuction.

Your genes play some role in how much fat you can store and where it settles in your body, but your lifestyle choices are the major contributors to what you make out of your predisposition. The best way to avoid the later complications of a dieting roller-coaster is to eat small frequent meals and stay active whenever you can.

By Elena Voropay