Are you incapable of putting on weight?

Richard Dower

Watching a late night program on the BBC, basically it had several guinea pigs who are all naturally slim to average, they tried for 30 days to load up on the junk food to see if they could gain weight, none of them did!....some even lost weight.

Ergo, some people have a genetic predisposition to being skiiny or they can eat a cow and never put on weight, while the program didn't tell me i hadn't already known about myself i'm wondering if others are in the same boat?

Sheeps

i believe they refer to it as metabolism

Sheeps

give they aul creotine a whack and you'll put on weight

starbelgrade

Does my ass look fat in this thread?

Richard Dower

Sheeps wrote: »

i believe they refer to it as metabolism

It's not metabolism, it's genetics.

RichieC

Yep, no matter what I eat I never put on an ounce, been 10 and a half stone for 10 years now.

All my family started packing on a few stone once they hit 25, not me, though.

I'm a racehorse! :cool:

Blatter

Eat more calories than you burn and you will put on weight.

Simples.

I don't buy this ''oh I have a high metabolism, I can't put on weight''

Man the f*** up and eat more you little bitch.

(Not directed at you OP, at people who moan about not being able to put on weight)

CrazyBiscuit

I eat like a machine but never seem to put on weight. I have always been skinny.

RichieC

CrazyBiscuit wrote: »

I eat like a machine but never seem to put on weight. I have always been skinny.

I'm the same, and i can be a right hooer for the fast foods!

RichieC

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

Eat more calories than you burn and you will put on weight.

Simples.

I don't buy this ''oh I have a high metabolism, I can't put on weight''

Man the f*** up and eat more you little bitch.

(Not directed at you OP, at people who moan about not being able to put on weight)

Sure thing, fatty! :P

CrazyBiscuit

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

Eat more calories than you burn and you will put on weight.

Simples.

I don't buy this ''oh I have a high metabolism, I can't put on weight''

Man the f*** up and eat more you little bitch.

(Not directed at you OP, at people who moan about not being able to put on weight)

Why should a man have to put on weight?

Tar.Aldarion

nope, infact i put on 3 stone in the last year or two that i must get rid of

damn those people!

Blatter

Richard Dower wrote: »

It's not metabolism, it's genetics.

No, it is metabolism.

Genetics is just a factor that alters metabolism like gender/activity rate etc.

Hurricane-Dean

I've always eaten loads and never gained anything and when I was working I had McDonalds most days for lunch and still stayed the same

Barna77

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

nope, infact i put on 3 stone in the last year or two that i must get rid of

damn those people!

Not to mention christmas.....

Tar.Aldarion

Barna77 wrote: »

Not to mention christmas.....

shure all the cushion help in some sort of car crash scenario right? right?!

Blatter

RichieC wrote: »

Sure thing, fatty! :P

You're so skinny that you use dental floss as toilet paper.

RichieC

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

You're so skinny that you use dental floss as toilet paper.

lol, you're so fat that you eh.... have to wear big trousers..

Okay I've got nothing.

seanybiker

I'm trying for a few years to put on weight. I'm at 13.6 stone now. Want to get to 14 and ill be happy. If I don't eat for a day the weight drops off me. I'm even eating green hula hoops and all to help it and I really don't like green hula hoops.

Blatter

seanybiker wrote: »

I'm even eating green hula hoops and all to help it and I really don't like green hula hoops.

Try to eat food that's not out of date, it tastes better.

seanybiker

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

Try to eat food that's not out of date, it tastes better.

But they're chewy

RichieC

ahhhahaha.. poor, wrong thread

Rizzla King

I eat a take away 3/4 times a week and I'm still 10 stone. Used to be 12.


Its all about the between treats.....

Lumen

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

No, it is metabolism.

Genetics is just a factor that alters metabolism like gender/activity rate etc.

Energy usage is largely governed by lean body mass. We covered all this in the fatties thread.

Sisko

Yep I'm one of those people.

Would be great if I was a normal weight 1st and then was unable to gain any but being stuck being skinny - as a bloke - is annoying.

Was much more annoying as a teen when your self conscious etc, also chicks seem to look at skinny men the way men look at fat chicks.

Still was funny when me and my friends all got into our twenties and all of them seem to just automatically get tubby meanwhile I looked exactly the same. That goes for everyone I knew in school , keep seeing people I knew in school who recognise me instantly, where as I've no idea till I realise its a much much fatter version of someone I knew years ago.

Still I'd rather be a little over weight then a little underweight. I'd be far more comfortable going topless at a beach for example then.

It's the most irritating and infuriating thing when someone mocks you for being thin, though it makes it somewhat funny when I'm far healthier than those doing the mocking.

Plumpynutt

yep, im skinny as fcuk. ill eat something and be hungry half an hour later.
im incapable of putting on any weight, been around the 9 stone mark for years now.

watna

Unfortunately not. I could eat anything I wanted and stay the same weight until I hit about 25 and then that changed and the weight crept on. I had to go on a diet and everything (I did lose it but now have to "watch what I eat" which let's face it, sucks. If I could talk to 16 year old me I'd tell her to stuff her face with cakes and things while she can because in ten years time she'll be counting the weight watchers points and cake will become her mortal enemy. To be fair, I didn't put on nearly as much weight as I should given what I was eating which just proves that metabolism is an unfair thing!


To all you skinnies out there in their late teens/early twenties enjoy it while you can. You too will turn in to a fatty one day.

neil_

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

Eat more calories than you burn and you will put on weight.

Simples.

I don't buy this ''oh I have a high metabolism, I can't put on weight''

Man the f*** up and eat more you little bitch.

(Not directed at you OP, at people who moan about not being able to put on weight)

This is the simple truth.. Some people do naturally burn more calories without doing anything but really the VAST majority of people are pretty similar, accounting for height/age/sex differences. I've met lots of people who have said they can't lose/gain weight, I don't think a single one of them was actually keeping track of their daily caloric intake. You get a lot of people saying they eat a gigantic takeaway every day, but then it turns out that they skip breakfast :rolleyes:

I have to eat a silly amount of food to gain weight but that's just because I exercise a lot and don't eat junk food much.

iPlop

Im naturally thin and at the moment Im ingesting large quantities of maas weight gain (not the shit you buy from argos full of fillers,the real stuff)which is having some effect but very little.My sisters are the same but they love the way they can eat and eat and stay thin.Im trying to tone up and it's a pain in the bollocks trying to gain weight

rubadub

I have found most lean people who tell me they eat like horses do not eat nearly as much as they think they do. There are a poster in the fitness forum trying to bulk up and his diet was similar to mine when I was trying to lose weight.

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~pel/fat/fat_genetics

It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at
the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people
who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered
to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing
their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to
six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed
10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard
to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants
present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent.
They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body
surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter
to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight.
Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed
there.

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot
stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when
they force themselves to gain weight. The body's metabolism speeds up
or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and
the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to
half its original speed.

10,000 is not incredible to me, I would have had that much in a day before a few times.

Ardennes1944

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

You're so skinny that you use dental floss as toilet paper.

you're so fat, when you were in school you sat next to eeeeeeevvvvvvvvvvvverybody

tman

Yep, my weight actually went down by a kilo over Christmas! Ideally I'd like to weigh a stone more than I do now, but it just won't happen. I'm destined to be a skinny bastard forever!

Biggins

Richard Dower wrote: »

Watching a late night program on the BBC, basically it had several guinea pigs who are all naturally slim to average, they tried for 30 days to load up on the junk food to see if they could gain weight, none of them did!....some even lost weight.

Ergo, some people have a genetic predisposition to being skiiny or they can eat a cow and never put on weight, while the program didn't tell me i hadn't already known about myself i'm wondering if others are in the same boat?

Yes, can't put on weight most of the time.
No matter how hard I try. I get to a certain weight and can't go over it.

aquaman

neil_ wrote: »

This is the simple truth.. Some people do naturally burn more calories without doing anything but really the VAST majority of people are pretty similar, accounting for height/age/sex differences. I've met lots of people who have said they can't lose/gain weight, I don't think a single one of them was actually keeping track of their daily caloric intake. You get a lot of people saying they eat a gigantic takeaway every day, but then it turns out that they skip breakfast :rolleyes:

I have to eat a silly amount of food to gain weight but that's just because I exercise a lot and don't eat junk food much.

I would agree with this.. And challenge anyone who claims they cannot put on weight to keep a diary of what they eat for a week, then using this diary calculate daily calories required for no weight gain (websites give calories of most foods)... eat more calories than this base rate every day for a month (still keeping the diary) and I GURANTEE you will put on weight!

On an aside, I saw a study of people who found it hard gaining weight on tv a couple of years ago.. They filmed lots of people 24/7 and found that the skinny ones were much more figitedy, never sitting still, always tapping a foot etc, thereby constantly burning extra calories!

newballsplease

Hurricane-Dean wrote: »

I've always eaten loads and never gained anything and when I was working I had McDonalds most days for lunch and still stayed the same

RIP

epgc3fyqirnbsx

aquaman wrote: »

I would agree with this.. And challenge anyone who claims they cannot put on weight to keep a diary of what they eat for a week, then using this diary calculate daily calories required for no weight gain (websites give calories of most foods)... eat more calories than this base rate every day for a month (still keeping the diary) and I GURANTEE you will put on weight!

On an aside, I saw a study of people who found it hard gaining weight on tv a couple of years ago.. They filmed lots of people 24/7 and found that the skinny ones were much more figitedy, never sitting still, always tapping a foot etc, thereby constantly burning extra calories!

Yeah you probably could manage to put on weith that way but who wants to work so gard at eating?
Eat a good breakfast, a good lunch, a good healthy dinner and a couple of snacks and if you dont put on weight then you dont put on weight.
I have no intention of forcefeeding myself a huge dinner a few times a day then trying to work or do whatever it is I generally have to do day to day

Wibbs

Skinny people overestimate what they eat, fat people underestimate what they eat and average people are pretty accurate. Plenty of studies have shown this.

I've seen it for myself with people I've lived with for any length of time. A mate of mine is skinny and she claims she can eat what she likes and her chunkier mates point at her and claim its her "metabolism*". Nope. She will eat what looks like a substantial dinner in the evenings, but misses breakfast most days, has a salad for lunch and rarely if ever snacks. Plus she walks everywhere. Her chunky mates will have three square a day, though a smaller dinner, eat more stodge and snack a lot more. I'd say same for any of my thin exes. Either they ate feck all, or they were major gym bunnies/sporty. Same for thin male mates.

This idea of metabolism changing in your 20's has some basis in fact I guess, but just from observation (particularly of male mates) I reckon there's more going on. For a start people tend to get less active in their 20's. They're more likely to get settled in a routine or indeed a relationship. The latter seems to affect women more as they often try to keep up with the guys food intake. Though relationships can fatten men up too. Especially if all they could do in the kitchen before was boil an egg.




*fat people have higher metabolic rates

Lumen

Wibbs wrote: »

Skinny people overestimate what they eat, fat people underestimate what they eat and average people are pretty accurate. Plenty of studies have shown this.

I've seen it for myself with people I've lived with for any length of time. A mate of mine is skinny and she claims she can eat what she likes and her chunkier mates point at her and claim its her "metabolism*". Nope. She will eat what looks like a substantial dinner in the evenings, but misses breakfast most days, has a salad for lunch and rarely if ever snacks. Plus she walks everywhere. Her chunky mates will have three square a day, though a smaller dinner, eat more stodge and snack a lot more. I'd say same for any of my thin exes. Either they ate feck all, or they were major gym bunnies/sporty. Same for thin male mates.

This idea of metabolism changing in your 20's has some basis in fact I guess, but just from observation (particularly of male mates) I reckon there's more going on. For a start people tend to get less active in their 20's. They're more likely to get settled in a routine or indeed a relationship. The latter seems to affect women more as they often try to keep up with the guys food intake. Though relationships can fatten men up too. Especially if all they could do in the kitchen before was boil an egg.

*fat people have higher metabolic rates

That said, I think there are well documented changes in the way that fat is deposited as you get older, e.g. fat being deposited around thighs to mitigate the effects of brittle bones.

So, the fat you have may be more visible, and it's not helped by us getting generally saggier and uglier as we age.

By "us" i mean "you" obviously. I'm a stud.

RDM_83 again

One problem with that study is that its prisoners being the study population, a group of people thats notoriously into the Gym culture!

RonMexico

Nearly 30 and my weight has barely altered in the past ten years. Even a year living in America and eating junk food & drinking like a fish didn't put an ounce on me. Noticed most of my friends have issues now with being overweight.

Nozebleed

RichieC wrote: »

Yep, no matter what I eat I never put on an ounce, been 10 and a half stone for 10 years now.

All my family started packing on a few stone once they hit 25, not me, though.

I'm a racehorse! :cool:

sure you're not a greyhound?:D

rubadub

RDM_83 again wrote: »

One problem with that study is that its prisoners being the study population, a group of people thats notoriously into the Gym culture!

It was done in the 1960's and I would be sure they would have taken it into account, if it was even popular to exercise in prisons back then. Seems they did less actually.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-law-of-thermodynamics-in-real.html

Dr. Sims first tried to make university students fat by having them deliberately eat two to three times their normal caloric intakes. Over 3 to 5 months, try as they might, the students were only able to increase their weights by 10-12% and couldn’t gain more.

His aborted experiments with students, as well as his later studies, confirmed that weight gain or loss cannot be explained simply by the number of calories consumed, said Dr. William Bennett, M.D., former editor of The Harvard Medical School Health Letter and co-author of The Dieter’s Dilemma. Dr. Sims then had to find a group of naturally lean people who would devote themselves to trying to get fat so that he could study them and compare them to people who were naturally fat. This led him to conduct his famous prison studies, published in 1968.

Groups of “equally dedicated volunteers at the Vermont State Prison” signed up, committed to eating as much as they could for 200 days to try to get fat. Far from being easy, it wasn’t. In fact, most of the men found it so extremely difficult that many considered dropping out. Forcing themselves to eat so much became so unpleasant a few even barfed after breakfast. “Most of them developed an aversion to breakfast,” wrote Dr. Sims. Virtually all of them at least doubled the amount of food they usually ate and simultaneously reduced their activity, and many were eating as much as 9,000 to 10,000 kcal/day he said. Still, only twenty men managed to gain 20 to 25% of their weight with great difficulty and the others couldn’t, even though they were consuming more calories than the others, wrote Dr. Sims.


Once the prisoners had gained weight, their metabolisms had increased by 50%. The men who were able to reach their goal weight found that they could only maintain their weight gain by continuing to overeat — on average ten times more than theoretically should have been necessary for their new size.

Dr. Leibel and colleagues at Rockefeller University later showed that when someone gains only about 10% of weight over their natural set point, their metabolisms increase by at least 16% over and above the expected increase for their size, as the body works hard to balance energy to maintain its natural size. Someone naturally lean has to eat enormous amounts of food to try and stay larger than is natural for them — so, they might be tempted to believe that naturally fat people must being eating that much, too. But that’s not so.

Handsome Bob

Weight Gain 4000 is your solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbBPFY08fcQ

Chuchoter

Maybe I do eat a lot less than other people, but what I eat is mostly really fattening sugary stuff so maybe it balances out!! I find it really hard to put on any kind of muscle though, which is irritating :S

mrsdewinter

I'm convinced I only started putting on weight after I started dieting, that is substituting "fatty" foods for their lo-cal alternatives. My theory is that the body needs fats and interfering with one's intake throws the system out of whack. Now I lash on olive oil and butter when I feel like it, and I'm a healthy size 10-12. That might put me in "heffalump" territory for some of you but it works for me.

sollar

SOCCER4LIFE wrote: »

Eat more calories than you burn and you will put on weight.

Simples.

I don't buy this ''oh I have a high metabolism, I can't put on weight''

I don't believe that anymore. I eat all sorts of rubbish and am lazy as sin but i don't put on weight.

My theory on it is that my body just takes what it needs and the rest goes out as waste regardless of how much i eat. Others store excess fat i just don't seem to do that.

yizorselves

I tend to put on a few pounds every couple of years. Filling out I suppose. I'm the same height 6'0-6'1 since I was 15 and weighed about 12 stone then. Now I'm 26 and I'm 14 stone. I still feel on the slim side. I've always stayed in shape gymming it, 5 a side and running. One thing I never want is a beer belly. I cant put on weight in the space of a month from just binge eating and drinking.

Awful_Bliss

I'm 10 and a quarter stone and 5'11"....and a bloke. Never lost weight, never tried to put on weight (why would I?). My dad's the same. He only put on a wee bit of weight after he gave up smoking.

Lia_lia

I don't know about this one really. I always seem to stay the same size. A year and a half ago I'd say I was at my biggest I've ever been (just over 5'9", 65kilos), and that's when I was eating all around me. But it didn't even really look like I'd put any weight on. I'm fairly tall for a girl so I guess I can carry it off. Now I'm about 57kilos (which is also what I've nearly always been since I was a teenager).

I don't actually eat very much though. And I exercise the whole time. I think what people were saying about skinny people *thinking* they eat more than they are supposed to is true. All my family are very thin, which makes you think it would be genetic. My brother is very muscly, about 5'11" but is still only about 62kg. But he doesn't really eat much either. I only really started to notice how much crap people eat when I moved out of home. Guess how you're brought up has a lot to do with it maybe? I don't know.

Wade in the Sea

People that find it difficult to put on weight are called ectomorphic. They'll have the same problem building muscle too. It is not something you can change dramatically but you can, with the right diet and exercise, improve your body mass.