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I say this as someone with a Ph.D. in human nutrition.

Did you happen to see the article a couple of days ago, I believe it came out of the UK, where "scientists" have discovered that obesity is linked to a common cold virus? I would be curious to hear your comments. I've always thought that obesity was caused by "fork in mouth" disease...

I heard about this over 10 years ago in grad school. My thesis advisor said it was some researcher working at U of W in Madison. Even if fat cells multiply, you still can't get any fatter than the amount of fat stored in them represented by the energy intake that is in excess of energy expenditure. Of course a complicating factor could be that the excess fat cells could add to hunger signals (via the hormone leptin that is secreted by fat cells) leading to more eating than is necessary for energy homeostasis.

The idea is that if you deplete a fat cell of fat too much, you'll get a hormonal signal basically saying, "Holy crap! Your energy reserves are getting seriously depleted. You'd better start eating so you'll have this energy buffer against future starvation."

More fat cells are normally produced as a response to overloading whatever happens to be the current number of fat cells. This is a physiological response to a nutritional state. If you were able via some other means than excess food intake to cause the number of fat cells to increase to a point that, for a particular level of energy intake, they were all depleted enough of fat stores, it's possible that a hunger signal could be sent out to restock the depleted fat cells. If you eat enough to quiet the signal, you'll be eating in excess of your caloric requirements.

This is why it's better not to gain too much weight than to try to lose it. If you trigger the production of more fat cells, you can deplete them of stored fat and lose weight, but the fat cells won't die until you do.