An introduction to Fat Redistribution and Weight Cycling
Day 11/30. Optimizing for writing out my thinking quickly, so there may be errors.
If you want to improve your body shape, there are three main things: Your bones, your muscle, and your fat. Each of these affect the full general shape of your body.
If you are a woman, you are interested in losing mass in most of your upper body, and gaining mass in your breasts and lower body. If you are a man, then you are typically interested in the reverse.
If you are transitioning, one of the levers you can try to control, is to alter where your soft tissue is (and to some limited extent, bones too). This is, influenced by hormones so we can look a bit at the theory of weight cycling as a form of fat and muscle redistribution.
Weight Cycling is the process of repetitively gaining and subsequently losing weight.
The most detailed post I have seen on this topic, is: Mesityl - MTF Weight Cycling, which goes into some methods and supplements, and explains why a large fraction of potential risks of weight cycling are likely correlational, if perhaps not all of them. I will write about similar topics, and attempt to cover more ground
One part of the theory is that human adipocytes turn over slowly, at roughly 10% per year, with half of adipocytes being replaced over about 8.3 years on average. But this is not the whole story, because the lipids stored inside adipocytes turn over faster than the cells themselves.
If you lose weight, then by default, your adipocyte cells do not die. Instead, they simply get smaller. Then, all else being equal, if you gain fat, then typically, your body will try to refill pre-existing adipocyte cells before creating new ones.
Your hormone levels can act as a pressure lever on where the fat tends to get stored. A feminine hormone profile prefers depositing fat in the legs, buttocks, and breasts, while a male hormone profile prefers depositing fat in the abdomen, back, and trunk.
If one tries to model the effects of HRT using adipocyte cell turnover, one finds it misleading, and studies seem to find redistribution effects way earlier than you’d expect if it acted via turnover. There seem to be two parts to this
Part of this may be from people gaining weight upon starting a HRT regimen, and part of this may cause new adipocyte cell growth.
The other part, is that the lipids stored within adipocyte cells get turned over at a faster rate than the cells themselves, with a mean life of ~1.6 years, rather than the estimate of ~8.3 you get for adipocyte cells.
HRT has been shown to be helpful. But the evidence for Weight cycling is weak.
Weight Cycling might help fat redistribution by repeatedly giving hormones chances to bias fat regain multiple times, but scientific evidence is lacking, and it’s unclear how large the effect might be. But there are also potentially other levers one could pull to make the effects more significant too.
Weight-cycling topics to discuss in future posts:
Weight cycling has two aspects to it, weight loss, and weight gain.
For weight loss there are two things to discuss:
one difficult aspect is in trying to lose weight at all. I will spend some time describing the current landscape on methods for losing weight, including dietary supplements and peptides.
The other aspect, is that one wants to stimulate the removal of fat from the right places. This can involve methods for trying to directly cause adipocyte cells to die, or can involve stimulating fat to be selectively burned from a specific area. Research here is still limited, but I will try to outline what exists so far
For weight gain, I will probably combine this into one discussion
Methods for trying to gain weight, and potential supplements. There are methods for trying to prevent fat loss from accumulating in some areas, and encouraging it’s growth in other areas. These are various levels of dubious, but I will list them all anyway.
I may venture into understanding the current landscape of muscle growth stimulation techniques too, but this is currently not an area I know much about.
Lastly, I will talk about shifting bone structure, through surgical means, as well as some more contentious non-surgical methods, and I will talk about surgical methods for fat redistribution too.