Are you incapable of putting on weight?

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.

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

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!

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.