What are the *risks* of losing weight (when overweight)?

This posts relates solely to people who are overweight or obese and who have excess weight to lose. Those who are at a healthy weight have different risks from losing unnecessary weight.

Edit: 30 May 2025 - nice article by Bethany Brookshire in Scientific American, New powerful GLP-1 drugs drop a lot of weight fast. How does that affect health? (About the effects of weight loss, particularly dramatic loss, on muscle and bone).

Edit: 29 June 2025 - I suppose enough people have recently been losing weight with the various Mounjaro / Ozempic type drugs for this question to be updated.

I've not heard of any additional atherosclerotic risks from people losing their excess weight. This could be because

• There is no additional atherosclerotic risk from losing weight
• The risks have not yet been reported or have not been specifically linked to the weight loss
• It's still too soon for any additional atherosclerotic risks to become apparent.
  

There may be other risks / side effects (adverse effects) from using these medications but this post is solely about the resulting loss in bodily mass arising from any method used to lose weight (fat).

Original post

I've sent an email to the World Obesity Federation to ask. My sciencey background never brought up this facet of weight gain / weight loss but I have occasionally wondered. 

If transporting fats around the body when putting on weight can lead to atherosclerotic damage and high blood pressure can't the same thing happen when losing weight as, from a 'transport infrastructure' point of view, there's no difference - fat, in the form of lipoproteins, is whizzing around in the blood whether it's about to add to or be taken from adipose tissue.

Here's what I sent, if I get a reply I'll add the gist of it.

I am trepidatiously adding 'weight loss' to the labels for this post, knowing that this will very effectively bring a lot of spam commenters to my yard ;)

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Hello :)

I'm curious to know about the risks of losing weight (the benefits seem fairly obvious). As a fat person I have plenty of fat stores, which initially grew because fats (directly or derived) from my diet would have been transported around in my blood and eventually stored in various adiposits. Presumably some will also have been laid down atherosclerotically en route. Bummer. I expect we'll find out in a few years. Probably not that many as I'm 51.

If I begin to lose weight wouldn't the exact same process happen in reverse? A bit of metabolism will free up some of my lard which will then lipoprotein its way around my bloodstream before eventually being breathed out as CO2. Presumably in doing its circulatory rounds some of it could also contribute further to any atherosclerosis.

So is losing weight quite a dangerous undertaking? Prevention certainly better than cure I suppose.

Also, would I then flood my system with all the fat-soluble vitamins? Not too bothered about D or K, but I might want to avoid self-overdosing on Vits A And E. Presumably there will be other fat-soluble things that pop out into my bloodstream, much like a molecular version of ancient mammoths being released from the melting permafrost.

My retweet of a tweet in a thread by Foone about composting the
rich, rather than eating them (Compost the rich, don't eat the rich)

Presumably in returning to my bloodstream these fats will make it thicker and stickier, adding a blood pressure risk to weightloss proceedings. Possibly one should lose weight very slowly. Or maybe take blood thinners while doing so.

I'd also presume that the relative risk weighs (ha!) more in favour of losing any excess weight but I don't think I've ever seen this aspect of risk considered. 

Can you point me to any research in this area (I have a degree in biochemistry* and have worked in a lipid chemistry lab so am comfortable with academic literature).
 
Thanks
Jo

*Pedantically my degree is B.Sc (Hons) Combined Studies because that's what the modular degree was called (you could also do Combined Arts). My degree is in Biology, Psychology and Computer Science. I then did a Masters degree in Neuroscience. Given that neuroscience kinda covers biology, psychology and computer science you might imagine some great intentional plan but no - entirely by accident. I don't think I'd even heard of the word neuroscience until graduating and someone suggested it as a (suddenly rather obvious) follow-up.

Testing a fake article generator from Article Max

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Source: www.articlemax.net

Holland and Barrett are flogging Cho Yung tea for weightloss

Very quick post to jot some thoughts down; another one for Trading Standards I think.

Recently I was briefly surprised to see Holland and Barrett selling a weight loss tea product (surely that's too silly even for them) but a quick trawl on Google indicates that even the affiliate marketers to be found in the MoreNiche forum are avoiding it (although see below for Proactol), and it's appeared on the MoneySavingExpert forum being highlighted as a scam as well.



As with all these weight loss teas it's quite difficult to find the company's actual website in among all the review sites (these exist solely to route visitors towards a purchase while taking up the top pages of all google searches for the product). I'm not sure if http://choyung.net/ is the original website because the writing tone suggests a certain distance between the author and the product (but that could just be a bit of dissembling) - anyway they seem to think the product has been taken off the market and are instead advertising Proactol which is yet another weight loss tea.

As always, I wonder what the evidence is for these weight loss tea products.

Right at the bottom of the Proactol page (redirected from Cho Yung) there's a rather amusing graph where they struggle to spell in vitro. I'm not sure how good a model of dietary fat absorption an in vitro test is, but there are hints of pilot data in humans but no indication of where this is published. Tellingly, the page is almost entirely filled with supportive statements from doctors (these are as meaningless as patient testimonials).

Not surprisingly, it's yet another site which is using the same Nottingham telephone number 0115 979 8449 and a quick search of the MoreNiche site shows that Proactol is being flogged by their members too.

Strangely enough, when I closed the Proactol tab there was a small warning message asking me if I really wanted to close the page. While I was reading, the page behind the popup message changed to advertising Tava Tea, another weight loss product (this time from Roduve Healthcare solutions) for which I've not found any evidence either, nor their weight loss patch which I previously blogged about. Their number is 0115 979 8437.