When I look at my friends who are thin (and they pretty much divide evenly among the woman as being very thin and needing to lost 25 pounds or so) the thin ones don't seem to follow the same pattern..
1) Friend One-is lucky in his metabolism. He can eat pretty much what he wants and not gain weight. He thinks he pays attention to what he eats, but I have seen no signs of that. His parents were thin, he inherited those genes.
2) Two friends only eat one meal a day and its late at night. Five days a week that one meal is a salad with chicken for protein. On the weekend, they have the largest meal I have ever seen. I couldn't begin to eat half of it. So they seem to have stomachs that are able to expand two times a week.
3). This friend never eats anything fattening. No cookies, cake, carbs, no bread, pasta, rice etc. And I mean never.
4) This friend orders a meal and only eats perhaps 1/4 of it and packs the rest up. This friend is also a fussy eater and can rule out most food because of that.
Do you have a thin friend? How does that friend maintain the weight? What's the secret?
I will say one thing about all of these friends. They are obsessed with being thin. Maybe that's the real key. It has to be the primary goal in your life.
11 comments:
Diane is thin. Her mother weighed 100 pounds most of her life (when she died, she was 87 pounds). Much of one's weight is due to genetics. I've been fighting the battle of the bulge for most of my life.
Both of my parents were thin. But my grandparents were not. Perhaps it skips a generation in some cases.
I was stick skinny as a kid but really put on some weight when I was in grad school and pretty much stopped exercising. I've never gotten terribly fat and do seem to metabolize pretty well. But I could certainly lose a few pounds.
Nah. I generally don't pay attention to that, all that much. Whereas Jackie has been obsessed with dieting since she was a teenager. At times I've decided to lose weight and have had no problem doing it. (Of course, if you want to keep it off, that's another story. Then you need to obsess about it like your friends.)
I do think a lot is genetics. My mother used to complain, "How come my sons are thin and my daughters are fat?" I think my brother (who is way thinner than I am; he's a vegetarian, by the way) and I take more after my father.
That is, I meant to say that these days I am way more concerned with eating healthy in general. I've always liked fruits and vegetables, so that isn't a problem. It's sheet laziness on my part when I do start eating "wrong" and gain a few pounds.
I eat a healthy diet-my numbers are good. But I am constantly hungry so restraining from grazing is extremely hard for me.
It's not all about food and it's not all about genetics. The two contributing factors to staying thin are food and exercise. Talk to nutritionist and they will all tell the you the same thing. Remaining thin or getting fat is not just what eat or how much you eat, but the combination of your diet and your activity. Genetics may have contributing factor but it's more related to metabolic behavior and not anything as silly as "the thin gene". Psychological state of mind has a lot to do with maintaining your weight as well. Depressed people, for example, can lose or gain weight very quickly depending on how they react to their problems.
As soon as I chose to stop being active I started to gain weight. For decades I rarely gained weight. When I hit age 45 weight started increasing nearly every year. My eating habits didn't change at all as far as what I ate or how much I ate. In fact, I've been eating less. But my activity level did change. I was no longer a bicycle commuter, I stopped doing theater, I stopped all the intense exercise regimens I kept up when I was obsessed about my looks. I've maintained a weight of 180 for several years now and not due to any radical changes in diet. I walk a lot more, I use the stairs at the hospital instead of the elevator, I ride the bike more. I probably should weigh much less and have a narrower waist, but I just don't feel like turning into a gym rat just to get a flat stomach again.
Doesn't bother me. I figure that, at my weight, all I have to do is grow another 18 inches and I'll be thin. If I wanted to, that is.
My thin friend is me - in the sense that in the last few years I have fluctuated enormously in weight (mainly due to stress). The odd part is that I am from a family of food-lovers and I really am not, so that kinda makes it worse ... - I am much happier the thinner I am, this much I know
You make an interesting point about being thin, Patti. I'm not saying I don't believe in healthy eating and all that. But I sometimes wonder if we sacrifice accepting ourselves and others for exactly who we/they are.
After the layoff from the old 50 hours plus/week job of 17.5 years, I was not desk bound and offered a discounted vending machine whenever I did bestir myself. Also, just before the end of that job, I started taking the diabetes drug Invokana. That, and a few other developments, have resulted in my dropping about fifty pounds, so that my weight at (long torso, shortish leg) 6' 1" fluctuates at about 210-215 rather than 260-275...35 years later, I'm back to my heaviest weight in my high-school years (the lightest I"ve been since reaching my full height has been about 180 pounds). And I have been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for almost 30 years, since 1989...it doesn't do all That much to keep one's weight down, but my cholesterol and such has been rather good through the years. Just finished scratching our youngest cat's belly (she likes this more than any other cat I've known), and that probably helps..I've love-bombed all three cats so far this morning.
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