The demon of dieting, known as 'weight cycling', rides the lives of countless health-obsessed souls, painting a pretty grim picture for their cardiovascular health. Clocking in constant episodes of weight loss only to stack the pounds back on-yo-yo dieting-isn’t just freakishly frustrating but downright health wrecking. According to a new study published in the JAMA Network Open, this pattern significantly ups your odds of experiencing nasty cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security if your overall weight seems stable-those rapid-fire weight fluctuations, irrespective of other risk factors, are enough to send your heart into a tailspin. The big man behind the study, Zakaria Almuwaqqat, MD, MPH, a hospital medicine doc and postdoc fellow in cardiovascular disease at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, warns: "At a population level, individuals with greater variability in BMI are at higher risk for adverse cardiovascular events compared to others with less BMI variability."

Scary stat alert: Half of all Americans attempted to lose weight in 2020, but somewhere between 80 to 95 percent of these svelte-seeking souls put all those shed pounds back on. That gives us a high prevalence of weight cycling-estimate and hang onto your kale chips-up to 55 percent of the population grapples with it.

What about drugs aimed at weight loss like Wegovy or Zepbound? Sure, they can keep you from blowing back up-only as long as you’re popping the pills.

The real ticking time bomb, though, is the sheer amount of lost and regained weight. The higher the "yo-yo", the higher the heart risk. Diving into two large pools of data - the Million Veteran Program (MVP) and the UK Biobank - all strut their stuff in a multi-year catwalk of weight fluctuation, the study finds some damning correlations.

Regardless of race or ethnicity, the more you bounce in the BMI, the greater the threats to your heart health. The stakes? For the veterans group, each 1 standard deviation increase in BMI variance linked to a heart-dropping 16 percent higher risk of heart disorders. Across the pond in the UK, the same BMI flopping led to an 8% increase in the chances for a cardiovascular death sentence.

"Greater change in BMI correlates with a higher risk of adverse cardiovascular events in a dose-dependent manner," says Dr. Almuwaqqat shielding himself from the expected volley of wilted iceberg lettuce.

That BMI bounce influences heart health outcomes depending on race and ethnicity. For Black participants, weight fluctuations severely upped the risk of strokes. Whilst in white subjects, yo-yo dieting nudged them closer to death's door through cardiovascular disorders.

So, why does weight hopping peg you for heart havoc? Nishant Shah, MD, a Duke Health cardiologist (who wasn’t involved in the research), suggests rapid changes in body weight may add extra stress to the heart, potentially leading to vascular dysfunction or more inflammatory fat tissue.

Despite all this gloom and doom, don't throw out your healthy weight goals just yet. Weight loss still has its perks (if you can keep the pounds off). Obesity, after all, opens the floodgates to endless medical maladies - high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes - all raising your overall risk of heart disease.

"The questions on whether weight fluctuations due to GLP-1s increase cardiovascular risks and what 'dangerous' amount of BMI variability remains", says Almuwaqqat. "It is evident that these drugs offer several benefits, but patients should weigh the benefits versus risks and discuss them with their healthcare provider on their prescription".