Understanding the biological response to weight loss: An individual perspective

Obesity is a global issue with rates increasing worldwide. Weight loss interventions tailored to an individual’s biology may provide improved health outcomes over traditional ‘one size fits all’ strategies. Understanding an individual’s response to weight loss is fundamental to addressing this. This Thesis has demonstrated that individual responses to weight loss interventions are highly variable. In both adults and adolescents, variation within outcomes were observed between individuals including location of weight lost and gene expression. These differences could be used to predict a person’s intervention response but substantial investment in future research is needed to realise this.