Thoughts on people who eat so much yet stay skinny

This is a great write up that should explain some of the "eat whatever you want" phenomena.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/role-of-nonexercise-activity-thermogenesis-in-resistance-to-fat-gain-in-humans-research-review.html

Why nonsense? I know 2 definite ectomorphs, either that or they have a tapeworm. They find it very hard to gain muscle and they are string thin, but both of them can eat, and they do, but mostly dirt. If there are people with naturally faster metabolisms I wouldn't swap with them because by their own admittance they eat more bad foods because as far as weight is concerned, they can, but they are really unhealthy even if they aren't fat. My ex was a mesomorph, he had alot of muscle when he did NOTHING. My boyfriend now eats waaaay too much, and of the wrong thing, it's catching up with him though, just not as fast as it should. He easily eats 4000 calories at least a day, his activity level is zero, unless you count pressing buttons on the xbox and he's only gained 10lbs in the past year. If I did that I would be like a house. Again not jealous, when I drag him out on the tiniest walk with the dog he puffs like a steam train, pulls muscles when he stands up, that sort of thing. I hate it actually, because I'm just watching him go to an early grave.

Different people do have different body types, different metabolic rates, and partition nutrients differently. But to suggest that all, or even most people fit into one of those three categories is ridiculous. For example, I'm tall with small joints, but I also have wide shoulders, I gain fat easily and don't gain muscle easily, so that makes me what??

Somatotypes have no basis in biology. It's just some stuff made up 75 years ago by a psychologist, who suggested that there were behavioral differences between the 3 categories. Funny, I never hear anyone suggesting that.

No one mentioned body type yet?

http://www.muscleandstrength.com/articles/body-types-ectomorph-mesomorph-endomorph.html

^^nonsense

Thank you.

I am not any of those- - - - I am just me, eat what I want and stay mostly thin and co-workers are envious as they stuff their faces with cake...It truly is what you put in your body..

I hate them, lol!!!

This is a great write up that should explain some of the "eat whatever you want" phenomena.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/role-of-nonexercise-activity-thermogenesis-in-resistance-to-fat-gain-in-humans-research-review.html

Yes, this is a good article. i think i am in this category since i never like to sit still :-)

It is possible that some adults might actually have brown fat that (due to its high basal rate of metabolism) allows people to burn more calories than others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue

Infants have a lot, as do hibernating mammals, and it used to be thought that brown fat (actually a type of muscle cell, not adipose tissue per se) went away as we grew up. But it has recently been found in some adults, through newer scanning technologies.

It's not clear yet if this really helps people stay skinny, but it is interesting.

they are probably skin outside but all of their fat is surrounding their organs

People who seem to eat what they want without gaining are either:
1. Very, very active
2. Not eating as much as you think

Example for #1 - my dad eats tons. But he never sits down. He has a physical job, is constantly moving, working on projects until it's bedtime, etc. He can eat a lot because his TDEE is high.

Example for #2 - A friend that packs away the food when we are out to dinner. But what I don't see is that she eats salad for lunch and yogurt for breakfast and very rarely snacks. She can eat what she wants in certain situations because she eats in moderation the rest of the time.

Actually, doctors used to think that skinny people who eat and eat and eat must be overstating it, or working out like crazy, or, er *insert handwavy stuff here*. And they were certain that fat people who exercise a lot and/or don't eat much, well they just must be lying, about everything, and sneaking home to eat a half-gallon of ice cream and a couple bags of Doritos, when nobody is looking.

A lot of doctors still think that -- if they have been paying no attention at all to the fascinating revelations in the fields of endocrinology and metabolic science over the past couple of decades.

Sure, a lot of people eat and exercise irregularly, a lot of people overstate or understate their energy intake or output.

But when scientists started actually studying the metabolisms of somebody other than healthy and active teenage boys, they discovered something amazing -- they vary! A lot! In ways that are still being elucidated!

Turns out, it is not just a matter of thin people, good; fat people lazy, greedy, bad.

Extreme examples include seriously ill patients who are bedridden and almost unmoving yet are wasting away, despite intaje of 5,000 to 6,000 carefully measured kcals a day. Or my very sedentary best friend in high school, who started her day with a huge breakfast ... Followed by a huge lunch, huge after-school snack, huge dinner, and huge dessert, and forced down a few milkshakes in between, because when she fell below 115 pounds, she would keep getting sick.

But what really shocked researchers was the pudgier types who -- when put into a controlled environment on a carefully monitored exercise plan (often less than they said they'd been getting) and carefully tailored diet (often more than they said they had been eating) -- maintained their weight or even gained.

Don't get me wrong. Lots of people have no idea of portion sizes and eat complete crap. Lots of people do nothing more active than walk to the fridge. But you can't know that by looking at them.

Other things being equal, people who eat badly and are insufficiently active will tend to gain weight. Yes. True.

But:
• Fitness -- eating well and maintaining an active lifestyle -- turns out to be much more important to health than body weight or even body fat
• Metabolisms vary, a lot, after all. Some of us are cut out to be supermodels, some of us are cut out to be famine survivors. (& Some of us are unhealthy in ways medical science is just beginning to figure out how to detect, much less treat.)
• A calorie is not just a calorie, after all. Much of the modern diet is not part of a healthy diet.
• Speaking of modern life ... The car and TV and computer are marvels. Ones that keep us far too still for far too long and, in the case of the electronics, help us foul up our sleep cycle.
• Your mileage may vary. Life is not fair. (Film at 11.) Welcome to the bell curve.

It helps me to know a fast metabolism can be a nuisance, too. *shrugs* I work with what I've got.

I know two people who eat a lot and stay thin. They're both close to me, so I've seen firsthand for years how much they eat and how little they exercise. I used to envy them, but then I got to thinking about all the junk they put into their bodies and how lazy they are. That can't be good in the long run, health-wise.

Skinny doesn't mean healthy anymore than "overweight" is necessarily unhealthy.

Not in all cases, but generally speaking, an overweight or obese person going from overweight to average weight, will improve health markers. As a whole, most overweight people will have worse health markers. I wouldn't say in all cases, but as a general trend, obesity is not good for health.

Generally speaking, an unfit person who begins to eat and exercise appropriately will show improvement in many health markers, regardless of what s/he weighed at the beginning and end of the process.

Focusing exclusively on weight encourages the pursuit of extreme diets, short-term weight loss and other stratagems that do not improve health, in the short or long term.

It also has caused physicians to ignore the very high actual health risks that face unfit skinny people.

And it has distracted attention from more meaningful health measures, such as nutrition status (many to most people in the US are short on magnesium, iodine, and vitamin D, for instance), and blood sugar level (apallingly few of us have glucose levels that stay in the 70-110 range associated with low triglycerides, and low rates of heart disease, kidney disease, nerve damage, brain shrinkage, and eye damage), & so on.

Apart from a particular kind of hormonally driven abdominal weight gain, fat and weight turn out to not be particularly goid markers of health, even if evaluated by one of the hosts of methods more meaningful than BMI.

I want to be fit and healthy.

I also want to be thin again -- but that's for vanity, and given the measures it took for me to achieve and maintain the look I want, it doesn't seem likely. And i know it's not compatible with good health.

I work with a girl who can eat ANYTHING she wants. Some mornings at 8 am she will show up at work with a slurpee loaded with ice cream. She is stick thin. She has a desk drawer loaded with candy and snacks that she eats everyday.

One day she mentioned that she worked out on her treadmill and had to get off after 2 minutes cause it was all she could do...2 minutes!

^Your coworker may have some issues that you don't know about. Not to assume, but she may have an eating disorder and may not keep all the cals in her body that she consumes. You just don't know. Especially if she can't last on a treadmill for more than a couple minutes...Plus, who the hell would want to be that out of shape to not be able to do two min on a machine? No thanks. I'll take strength over candy any day

It's not just that they are more active than you think, or they eat less than it seems. I live with my husband, I know how much junk food he eats, and how often. He will eat an entire pizza for lunch. He has always been lean, and toned and he never catches any problems from his doctor at check-ups (cholesterol, blood pressure etc) I am not sure how that works that way for him. Even so, I have been working on getting him to eat more healthy, not that he does or anything.

If his check-ups are fine, then leave him alone. There's nothing wrong with pizza. Why does everyone hate on pizza?

I used to know some people like that. Turns out when they age it catches up to them. My older sister is a great example of this. She used to eat a lot and never gain weight, she continued her eating habits and is now overweight with no real other changes to her diet or exercise routine. Just got older.

I used to think that about myself. I could eat whatever I wanted well into my 40s and was never more than borderline pudgy until past the age of 50. Advancing age and menopause, I thought, but I know now that changing habits had more than a little bit to do with it. I'd gotten lazy about cooking, so we were eating out once or twice a week and were eating way too much "heat and serve" food at home. I rue the day when I discovered I could buy bagged meals for 2 with grown up ingredients like artichoke hearts in them. And I'd gotten in the habit of keeping my refrigerator stocked with soft drinks, which was something I never did when I was younger. The excess weight has been off for ,more than a year now and the key to keeping it off has been breaking my coke classic habit and going back to cooking from scratch and eating the way I did 20 years ago. I do need to be more careful about portion control now, but I think that's largely because my standards had been corrupted by restaurant meals and prepared foods. It's not just the burger joints that super size their portions.

All that said, I do think I made out fairly well in the genetic lottery, though not as well as my sister. She's 5'9" and has never weighed as much as 130 pounds when she wasn't pregnant. I've always had a softer, more rounded build and my weight "set point" ran several pounds higher than hers during our prime years, despite the fact that I'm a couple of inches shorter. Maybe body types are nonsense, but by that site's description I have strong ectomorph tendencies and she's the real thing. So was our dad.

K...but what about my husband, who can easily eat McDonald's (or similar) every day (and sometimes does), snacks like crazy on chips, chocolate and at LEAST a can of Coke a day....and has a sit down at a desk/in his car job......but is still super skinny! I KNOW he eats plenty, and that it's not healthy (because he is so boring to cook for...hates almost all veggies and he's so stubborn he won't try new study). I wish I had his metabolism or whatever it is....but I would still take care of myself and keep healthy.

Have him track his intake every day for a month. Until then, you don't know his caloric intake.

This.

I don't envy them. I have a friend who I see snacking all day, she has to eat lots of calories and try to keep within a reasonable budget. She always has snacks and seems always hungry, but she's so skinny and has health problems like very very low blood pressure to show it. She has some problem with her arm now that involves nerves and not enough fat or something, it's terrible and pains her constantly.

So no, I don't. I'd rather have my normal metabolism (which most of us overweight people have) and just learn to live properly. People like her have no choice. If they don't eat constantly, they literally will just wither away.

Most often, yes, I’m jealous. But then I also consider that they could have a disease (ie: Cystic Fibrosis) or metabolic disorder that prevents them from gaining weight. On the outside of that, my husband can eat whatever and whenever he wants and is a stick! But he has a physically demanding job that keeps him active all day. On top of that he comes home and spends another 2-3 hours busy managing our farm property. I don’t think it’s possible for him to enough to get fat!