Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

As someone who's struggled with weight loss, and have known others to struggle with it well, I think we colloquially called this "slow metabolism".

It always did feel like it was easier to gain weight than lose it, especially fat weight and not muscle weight for me.

I was recently sent a video about fat adaptation (basically teaching your body to be better at burning fat) by a very fit friend, but I wonder how much of that is bro science and how much of it is grounded in reality. Maybe worth looking into more deeply if it can counteract or balance out this.

The physical mechanism is mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCP). They regulate how much energy is wasted as heat when converting ADP to ATP, determining how efficient one’s metabolism is. When you lose weight, your UCP proteins start wasting less and less energy when producing ATP, which is one of the things that makes dieting so hard.

Actually affecting that pathway is largely beyond us at the moment (that’s the bro science) but the mechanism is relatively well understood.

Is this similar to what 2, 4 dinitrophenol affects?