A Gut Feeling about Body Weight

You’re unlikely to hear a brass fanfare when you reach for the carrot sticks instead of the cookies, nor wild applause when you lace up your shoes for an evening walk instead of collapsing onto the couch. That is to say, all the small decisions you make to manage your weight and your health can feel downright anticlimactic. But you do have a cheering section for these actions—albeit an invisible one. Every lifestyle choice, no matter how modest, gets noticed and celebrated by a crowd that’s trillions strong: the diverse community of micro-organisms that call your gut home. New research shows that while the microbes in your digestive tract may not directly cause you to gain or lose weight, they are thought to influence your metabolism and serve as mediators between your lifestyle choices and your body weight.