If you have aspirations of losing weight, perhaps becoming the next Instagram fitness model, then listen carefully. Recent studies published in the journal “Obesity” have found that five days of eating junk food crashes your metabolism.

That’s right, binging can ruin all of your gains.

Researchers responsible for writing the journal sought to find out how certain skeletal muscles adapt when we excessively indulge in eating fatty processed foods, so they took 12 healthy college students and put them on an eating regimen that was designed by researchers that was replete with processed foods.  

The experiment went as such:  Half of the students involved consumed foods in which 55 percent of their calories came from fat while 18 percent came from saturated fat. The other student’s diet consisted of about 30 percent fat.

In an article with Time Magazine, Matthew W. Hulver, Ph.D., department head of Human Nutrition, Food and Exercise at Virginia Tech, spoke of the experiment.

“When we were toying around with what diet we were going to use, we looked at things like gift certificates for McDonald’s,” Hulver said. “But a McDonald’s diet isn’t even saturated enough compared to what we fed the people in our study. We settled on a Westernized diet topped with butter, featuring foods like macaroni and cheese, ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise and butter, and fatty microwavable meals. The researchers took muscle biopsies from the men before and after the high-fat feeding. The researchers formulated the fatty diets to be identical in calories to the control.”

The group with the highest amount of fat consumption struggled readjusting back to their normal diets and went through an extended period of weight gain, even when eating healthy. The overall result proved just how important it is to have certain foods in moderation — because in excess the results can prove to be harmful in both short term and long term.