Should You Lose Weight or Use It? An Exploration into the Yo-Yo Phenomenon and Maintaining Healthy Weight

Starting on a Holistic Weight Loss Journey

When you begin this journey toward better health, the first week often brings rapid changes. That initial drop on the scale is what we might call detox weight loss. This is the phase where your body begins letting go of what it no longer needs, not toxins in the dramatic sense, but the stores of glycogen as well as waste products that have accumulated in the gut and body.

After a week or two, the numbers tend to stabilize. What follows is a slower, more meaningful process as your body shifts its focus to optimizing fat usage for repair and survival.

For a mind excited by the initial dramatic weight loss, this new stage is unwelcome. It feels like what we are doing is not working. It appears as if we are failing, as if the holistic program is failing.

Why is it that after an initial loss of up to five kilograms in a week, we have now slowed down to a kilogram or less per week?

To truly understand holistic healing, wherein our kilograms are our resources for healing, not liabilities that need to be discarded as soon as possible, we need to step back and examine something more fundamental: how we perceive weight itself.

Two Worlds, Two Perspectives

In the modern Western outlook, weight is framed as a problem. It is something undesirable from every angle, cosmetically, organically, metabolically. The narrative is relentless: weight causes heart problems, weight causes diabetes, weight causes metabolic dysfunction, weight causes joint pain. In this view, weight is the enemy, a negative force that must be fought, subdued, and eliminated as quickly as possible.

But there is another way of seeing things, one rooted in ancient Eastern wisdom. In this understanding, weight is not the problem at all. Weight is a solution waiting to address an underlying issue.

Let me explain what I mean.

The Body’s Silent Accounting

Consider how we live. The more we work, interact within society, and expose ourselves to various stressors, the more damage accumulates within the body. Every interaction, every activity, every reaction produces byproducts and metabolites. There is nervous tension, physical tension, the constant hum of modern life. And here is the crucial thing: you might not perceive something as stressful. Being on calls for hours, counseling others, attending back-to-back meetings, sleeping late night after night, your mind may adapt and tell you that everything is fine. But the body perceives it differently.

Think of sitting in a room where a fan makes a continuous ticking sound. Tick, tick, tick, tick. After a while, you stop hearing it. Your neural circuits filter out the noise so your mind can function. But the sound is still there. The body still registers it. In the same way, we accept certain avoidable stresses into our lives, telling ourselves there is no point paying attention to them. Yet the body bears the brunt.

When rest is insufficient to repair the accumulating damage, something remarkable happens. Day by day, as the damage adds up, the body in its infinite natural wisdom begins to store funds: resources that can be used for repair when rest finally becomes available. The body starts preparing for a time when the stress will ease, so that in the absence of new damage, it can begin its essential repair work.

This is why the body puts on weight. It invests in fat as a currency, a fuel that can later be used to heal, repair, and rejuvenate.

The Fuel Analogy

Imagine you need to travel from your home to a grocery store just down the road. The amount of petrol you need in your car is minimal, perhaps a liter is more than enough. But if you need to travel a few hundred kilometers, you must ensure you have sufficient fuel to go and come back. If you cannot carry that much, you at least need enough resources to make it to a station where you can refuel along the way.

As our stresses mount, the body operates on the same principle. It keeps storing fat because it anticipates a long journey ahead. The more work required, the more resources needed.

Here is the paradox that modern thinking often gets backwards. We perceive weight gain as the cause of our declining health. We tell ourselves, "I am gaining weight, and therefore I am becoming more and more unhealthy." But the truth is the reverse. As you become more unhealthy due to accumulated stress and insufficient repair, your body gains weight because fat is the only fuel that can pay for the healing you require. Many of the emergent diseases of our time have come from this very cycle of stress, and the body needs to gain weight to handle them.

What Your Weight Is Telling You

When you stand on the scale and see a certain number, your body is communicating something important. It is saying, "I think it is time for us to start working on the problem beneath the surface. If you give me your permission and the much-needed rest I have been waiting for, I will begin the work."

But here is something beautiful and often overlooked. Even for the body to begin this healing process, your permission is essential. Your conscious cooperation matters.

Prehealing: A Different Goal

In the journey of what we might call prehealing, when we talk about weight loss, we are not actually focused on losing weight at all. We focus on weight usage for healing. This distinction changes everything.

Think carefully about this. Your body has painstakingly collected those kilograms of fat over the years. It did not do this to burden you. It did this to resource you. So we do not want to waste that resource. We do not want to lose weight in the sense of discarding something valuable. Instead, we want to use weight. We want to help the body put those reserves to their intended purpose: to heal, to repair, to rejuvenate.

Spending Wisely

Consider how you would use your financial resources. If you have saved enough money to travel from your home to a destination and back, you would not look for ways to spend as much as possible just to empty your savings. You would try to make the trip economically sensible. You would spend what is required, no more. You would be resourceful.

The same wisdom applies to your body. When we approach weight from this perspective, our goal becomes using the minimum weight to achieve the maximum return on investment. We want to spend wisely, not wastefully.

When you proceed from this understanding, your concern shifts entirely. You stop obsessing over weight loss. Your focus becomes healing and repair. The steady reduction in weight becomes merely an indication that you are healing, an unintended side effect, a sign that your body is spending its saved resources on the only activity it truly cares about: maintaining cellular integrity and health.

The Pace of True Healing

Weight will drop each day, but that drop is not a loss. To you, it becomes a gain, a gain of health, of vitality, of genuine well-being.

Even if you see only fifty to one hundred grams of change day to day, that amounts to about three kilograms per month. The returns from this steady, sustainable approach are remarkable. You are optimizing your weight usage rather than turning the process into a loss-making venture. You are using weight in the best possible way because this is precisely what the weight was stored for.

From a prehealing perspective, for someone on a program of holistic healing, this realistic expectation of two to three kilograms per month is entirely sufficient. That is all that is needed.

Lessons from Extremes

There is a true story of a Scottish man, Angus Barbieri, who undertook a water fast for an entire year. He lost nearly one hundred and twenty-five kilograms in that time. Yet soon after, he started gaining weight again. Consider also the participants of a certain television show, The Biggest Loser, focused on dramatic weight loss. Most of them regained their weight as well. The show did help us gain deeper insights about metabolic adaptations during and after periods of intense stress.

Why does this happen? The problem lies in our perspective. When we see weight as negative and strive to lose it as quickly as possible, making the journey extremely stressful, we miss the deeper purpose. The key distinction is this: if you simply lose your weight, it is likely to come back. But if you use it for its intended purpose, it will never return.

The Destination Matters

Let me offer an analogy. You have filled forty liters of petrol in your car to travel a distance of two hundred kilometers. If you were to drain all the petrol from your tank, that would make no sense at all. But if you use the petrol, you reach your destination. Your fuel level drops to half. If you return without refilling, the tank becomes almost empty. You have used your petrol and completed a meaningful journey.

We do not waste petrol, and similarly, we should not waste fat. Fat is fuel that helps us journey back to health. Losing it without purpose is like draining the tank halfway. When people lose weight without putting it to its intended use, they regain it because the underlying need has not been addressed. If you have not reached your intended destination of health, your body will naturally refill its reserves. It will continue to store fat until you have arrived at the place of true healing.

This is why so many people who pursue weight loss from a purely Western perspective find themselves trapped in a cycle. They lose weight, they regain it, they lose it again, they regain it. The literature supports this observation. Based on the show The Biggest Loser, there is a landmark 2016 paper in Obesity by Fothergill et al. showing persistent metabolic adaptation and weight regain. If you lose by forcing weight loss, you are bound to gain. It becomes a yo-yo, an exhausting oscillation that never reaches resolution.

How Can Weight Loss Become Stressful?

We need to remember that the stored form of energy, fat, is more energetically dense. That is, it releases more energy per gram than carbohydrates. Not only is it more dense, it is also in the best format for the body to use without any distractions. For example, when you eat a meal there are multiple components the gut has to process. Furthermore, it needs to carefully allow only selected molecules and monitor the process of digestion and elimination. This process is bypassed when the body is able to use fats stored in adipocytes. When released as fatty acids, they become a clean source of energy for mitochondria. What is more, they even release an equivalent weight of the purest water as they are broken down to release energy.

Let’s understand in depth with an analogy of the car. Let’s assume your car gives a mileage of ten kilometers per liter. You want to exhaust forty liters of fuel by the time you reach your destination two hundred kilometers away. You have accepted the challenge. Now you need to force your car to use double the quantity of petrol. Can you do it? Of course. Make your driving less efficient. Drive in lower gears, accelerate more, make your engine heat up and waste energy. Whilst you might be able to successfully complete the challenge, it would have negatively impacted your car too. This damage comes from the stress of trying to burn more than what is possible.

From the human body perspective, aggressive and excessive weight loss, where we burn more than what is necessary, would cause significantly more net damage than repair. As a result, the weight gain would be higher than before. That’s why the yo-yo effect occurs.

A Final Reflection

None of this is to say that weight gain is acceptable without question. Every kilogram you gain is an indication that your body is filling more fuel in its adipose tissues, preparing for a journey you may not have consciously chosen to undertake. The invitation is to understand the language your body is speaking, to recognize the wisdom in its processes, and to work with that wisdom rather than against it.

When you shift your perspective from losing weight to using weight for healing, everything changes. You stop fighting your body and begin partnering with it. You honor the resources it has stored. You give it permission to do what it has been waiting to do all along: to heal, to repair, and to restore you to the fullness of health.

The scale becomes not a source of anxiety but a gentle indicator of progress. Each small daily change is a message that your body is spending its reserves wisely, investing in your well-being. And when you finally reach your destination, a state of genuine health and vitality, you will find that the weight you used along the way has served its purpose beautifully. It will not return, because there is no longer any need for it. You have arrived.

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In our next post, we look at weight loss from the lens of a car driver. Learning to drive in a way that the vehicle is not stressed nor are the occupants of the vehicle bored. We will touch on the principles of prehealing, wherein we reach the destination in a way that our body is healthier, our mindset has shifted, and the lack of extreme metabolic stress helps us escape the yo-yo effect.