Fat cell hyperplasia. The dark side of getting fat.

As you gain a lot of body fat your fat cells will hypertrophy (the physical growth of a singular cell), so they get bigger they fill up with fat. When your muscle cells hypertrophy they just get bigger but they don’t undergo hyperplasia, (cell division and cell replication), they just undergo hypertrophy.

When fat cells undergo hyperplasia, they fill up to the point where they can’t add any more fat which causes cell division, the cell divides in half and you have two smaller fat cells, then you keep gaining weight and those two fat cells divide and so on and so forth. When you lose a bunch of weight later after you’ve made all the cell division, all the cells shrink but they don’t die, they’re always around, so you can be lean again but the number of cells that you have it’s causing a variety of hormonal and other factors to be differently regulated in the body.

I can’t emphasise this point enough, high body fat gain is not something you want to burden yourself with, probably one of the biggest pieces of epidemiological advice someone could give you is don’t become obese in the first place.

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