“Can I gain weight just by drinking water?” People like this…no matter how much they control their diet, they have this brain problem

There are quite a few people who say, “You can gain weight just by drinking water.” Does water really make you gain weight? Many people adjust their diet to lose weight, but if your brain does not respond, you may not be able to lose weight.

The hypothalamus, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain, regulates hunger and satiety to keep body weight constant. Obese people may have disruptions in brain signal transmission.

Hugovina Ozempic, which is called an obesity treatment, has dramatically reformulated weight loss treatment. Weekly injections of the drug along with diet and exercise can help you lose about 15% of your body weight. This drug does not directly change your body’s ability to burn fat. It works in part by changing the brain’s response to food. ‘Live Science’, an American science media outlet, published an article about this system.

“Our brain wants to maintain a certain weight in much the same way that it maintains body temperature within certain limits,” said Dr. Michael Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. During human evolution, people who maintained body fat at a certain level were more likely to survive during periods of food shortage and were able to avoid health problems caused by being overweight.

Set point theory explains why diets often fail. The brain wants to keep your weight above average and sends chemical signals that stimulate hunger and signals that make it difficult to lose weight.

“These systems are the biggest obstacle to long-term weight loss,” says Dr. Schwarz. When we eat, our intestines secrete hormones and small peptides, or protein fragments, into the bloodstream. Ozempic is an enzyme called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1). ) and ghrelin, which helps regulate hunger, these chemicals reach the brainstem via the gut-brain axis, the communication highway between the gut and the brain.

The brainstem sends signals to the hypothalamus to make people feel full. The hypothalamus monitors how much people eat and how much body fat they store. This function detects the hormone leptin, which is released in direct proportion to the proportion of adipose tissue.

“When leptin levels fall below the range dictated by the setpoint, the hypothalamus sends several signals to the rest of the brain,” he said. “Changes in the brain make people feel hungrier, seek out food and increase sensitivity to pain. “Reduce anything that could cause you to lose weight or interfere with your eating,” he said.

Neurons in the hypothalamus turn on motor neurons that plug into the jaw to produce chewing movements. This chain of events relies on a simple circuit in the brain made up of three types of neurons. According to a 2024 study published in the scientific journal Nature, when this circuit is activated, the animal begins chewing regardless of whether there is food nearby. Researchers discovered this simple brain circuit in mice and expect something similar to exist in people.

If your brain is wired to maintain a certain weight, how can you become obese? There are conflicting hypotheses among obesity researchers, but one theory involves so-called AgRP neurons, a cluster of brain cells in the hypothalamus. These cells play a powerful role in appetite. Suppressing neurons in adult rats causes the animals to ignore food to the point of starvation, while stimulating them causes uncontrollable eating.

Under normal conditions, AgRP neurons are maintained by hormones and nutrients that signal energy surplus, including leptin, insulin, and glucose. When mice are fed a high-fat diet, support cells called glial cells surrounding AgRP neurons are activated and their number increases. This reaction, called gliosis, which commonly occurs when nerve cells are damaged, was also detected in brain scans of obese patients.

Reduced sensitivity to inhibitory signals can lead to dramatic changes in body weight. If the hypothalamus detects only half of the body’s total leptin levels, it can calculate stored fat levels well below the set point, triggering brain signals that increase food cravings and promote weight gain.

How does semaglutide, the active ingredient in WeGobee and Ozempic, trick the brain into losing weight? This drug mimics GLP-1. It binds to the GLP-1 receptor in the brainstem and stimulates the neural circuit that causes the feeling of fullness. This is thought to counteract appetite-inducing signals from AgRP neurons, thereby suppressing signals from the hypothalamus that lead to more eating.