But that's not what I was going to talk about. A while ago I was depressed about my weight and looked on the site where I find documentaries after something about weight-loss. It always makes me feel better seeing people who are worse off than me (does that make me a horrible person...) which is one of the reasons I love watching shows like Biggest Looser and the likes. Anyway, I found a documentary with the title Why Are Thin People Not Fat? and felt that this was a question I wanted an answer to. There were a few different parts to it but the most interesting was an experiment they did with thin people where they had them eat 5000 calories a day for about a month with no exercise to see how their bodies reacted. They all gained weight, around 5 kg each but their reactions to it was different. One of them gained not fat but muscles! His body got a lot of extra nutrient but didn't want to get fat so it produced muscle (this without exercise) which consumes more energy than fat thus using more of the food he ate for things other than getting fat.
I wish my body would do that... :(
And even though they all gained weight they lost all or almost all of it in the following two weeks. The bastards.
What the scientists deducted from this (and other) experiment was that all people have a weight that their body is going to deem ideal, it can be 50 kg or 150 kg, and that it will strive towards. That means that if you overeat your body will try to adjust so that the extra energy goes elsewhere. But it also means that when you're trying to loose weight your body will do everything to go back to the weight that it wants.
They had made experiments with overweight people where they lost weight and then were put on a diet made to maintain that weight, basically eating normally. When they measured their brain-activity it was sending signals equivalent of a semi-starving person doing everything to make the person eat more food. So if these people were going to keep the weight off they were going to have to live with battling their brain for the rest of their lives.
The documentary was very interesting but extremely disheartening, basically telling you that whatever you do your body has the last say in what you weigh. I'm not completely convinced though, there are a lot of people who have lost a lot of weight and kept it off and I'm going to join that group, no matter what my body wants!
I've already lost almost 15kg and I'll fight to keep it sinking! Yeah fighto-oh!
The documentary can be seen here for those interested: