I saw a study a couple of months ago a year ago where weighted capsules were stuck inside mice, and then the mice ate less and lost weight. When I first saw it, I thought it was neat and then forgot about it.

I am not a scientist or even a person particularly capable of critiquing/analyzing/evening reading it, but I'm going to, anyway!

Paraphrased, hopefully accurately, abstract

When people (or maybe any animal?) sit a lot, they tend to weigh more than if they stand a lot, even if they exercise a lot. Why? We think there might be a regulatory effect on body weight caused by body weight.

When we put weighted capsules in rats and mice, they ate less and they weighed less (accounting for the extra capsule weight). Leptin, a hormone that affects appetite, is primarily(?) made in fat, so extra leptin from fat is probably not the cause of this appetite reduction; so we think there is another regulatory system.

It is also the case that osteocytes, a kind of cell in bone, are affected by changes in bone strain. Mice with (without? fewer) osteocytes didn't lose weight when they had weighted capsules added, so we think that our proposed non-leptin weight regulation mechanism, the "gravitostat", depends on how much force is applied to bones.

We think that the gravitostat is likely to explain why people/animals that sit more tend to weigh more than those that stand more. We think that signals from this gravitostat is used with signals from leptin to regulate body weight such that it's bounded both above and below.

( I read the thing and wrote down my paraphrasing of... nearly the whole thing. )

anyway

A response to the study got published, too. I think it's approximately "That's interesting, and here are some results which support it (effects of hypergravity and microgravity on rodents), and here are some that don't support it (astronauts)."

I've been sitting down the entire time I've been writing this, and though we have a standing desk, currently there's a pile of cat toys, electronics, and blinkenlights in front of it; maybe I'm going to clean today.