Fat, muscle, and activity burn calories.
If you lose weight you’re probably burning fewer calories unless you replace it with muscle.
Activity levels also vary over our lives. We tend to be more active when we’re younger.
You might need to put on some fat to gain muscle EFFICIENTLY, but it's not a requirement for putting muscle on at all.
But my point is, if someone loses a bunch of fat their bmr is going to take a hit. Could be pretty significant on the order of hundreds of calories a day.
Read that again. Six kilograms, per year. Every year.
Given a person consuming near their total daily energy expenditure, that’s the difference between losing almost 20 kg since the start of COVID, and gaining 20 kg.
Small changes over time compound in unintuitive ways, which is all the more reason not to dismiss them so flippantly.
It's sad to see what nonsense (like "metabolic damage") people will invent to justify failing at weight loss (or worse, never even attempting weight loss).