Why are thin people not fat?
Watching a very interesting Horizon documentary this evening on why some people are fat and others are not. There were some very interesting conclusions, although as with all of these things you cannot make a hard and fast rule.
So what did they say? Our bodies have a natural body weight and it will work quite hard to maintain that weight.
But things start off before we are even born! Our natural body weight will be set by the health, age and weight of our mothers. So if your mum was overweight, ate poorly, took no exercise and was older when she was pregnant the cards are stacked against you from the start.
This continues into toddlerhood. If you manage to remain slim through your early childhood you can restack the odds but if you were a chubby child then you are setting up habits for life and you didn’t even know it. Studies show that fat adults were more often fat in childhood and thin adults were more likely to have been thin in childhood. Also, when thin children become fatter in adulthood they find it much easier to lose weight than their chubby peers.
There were several other comments. We are born with a certain number of fat cells and throughout our lives these will expand and contract depending on how much fat needs to be stored. If, however, we continue to consume too many calories eventually the number of cells we have get so full that the body has to produce more fat cells to take up the excess. This is very bad news as once the body has produced fat cells it cannot unproduced them so you are more likely to hold on to weight.
There is also a belief that the adenovirus can cause the body to alter how it handles fat cells. This is a similar strain to that of the common cold. What happens is that the virus goes via the lungs to the fat cells where it instructs them to replicate themselves which is bad news for maintaining a slim body.
There is another thought that obese people may have reset their natural body weight to their overweight weight. This may explain why even when they have consumed enough calories for a normal body weight they are still hungry. MRI scans show that the part of the brain that activates when the body thinks it is in a starvation situation is still activated in obese people even when a normal meal has already been consumed. (we can probably reset this back to normal with Kinesiology)
In one of the experiments they carried out showed that some people when they eat more calories are able to reset their Basal Metabolic Rate to burn faster which in turn uses up more calories so maintaining their natural body weight. One chap even managed to increase his muscle density whilst doing very little exercise! He was Oriental and I wonder how much of this was due to his genetic heritage.
And another experiment with pre-school children showed that even at this age some will continue to eat even when they have said that they are full whereas others will not – even when the food on offer is chocolate and biscuits.
All very interesting to watch and gave me some thoughts on how we can change some of these parameters with Kinesiology. So if you feel the odds are stacked against you regarding weight and would like to investigate how we can change those odds more in your favour give me a ring.
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