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What gene and gene variant are you referring to?

Also, AFAIK the number of fat cells you have is pretty much constant through adulthood. When you lose or gain weight is just those fat cells becoming smaller or bigger.

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Gene FTO, gene variant rs1421085

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25074273

https://www.23andme.com/you/explorer/snp/?snp_name=rs1421085

http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs1421085

has a wider collection of the literature and links to the recently published http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26287746 which finally establishes this as the causative snp and explains the method of action.

Thank you!

Except that the variations of the gene associated with obesity are also associated with eating a huge amount more:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/oby.2008.318/abst...

Which is a much simpler explanation.

And even so, carriers of even the highest risk form of the gene are still on average only 6.6lbs heavier than normal:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646098/

I've also read this repeatedly, and cursory googling[1] seems to confirm it.

[1] https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=ssl#q=fat+cells+constant

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