To ask why it is that it is accepted that people can be naturally thin, but not naturally fat?

[MrsShawnHatosy]

Just that really. It seems to me that if one can be true so can the other. But fat is seen as something blameworthy, always.

Yes it makes sense if a disease causes weight gain and cancer, but most cancers occur in both overweight and slim people, but more often in overweight people.

I agree with you, btw, that we need to work out wtf is going on with weight increase. There's great research going on with gut biomes at the moment.

I used to be fully on the "self control unless there is a disease like hypothyroid going on" camp but I'm far removed from that now. Gut biomes and epigenetics look very influential.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people use that trite phrase to make themselves feel smart at other people's expense. Also not keen upon the systematic starvation and murder of millions of people on the basis of their ethnicity and religion (plus politics/sexuality/disability) being co-opted as some sort of 'oh, I'm so smart, I tell it like it is' zinger.

Thing is, we know the nazis experimented on anyone with a medical anomaly. Anyone not losing weight on a stemi-starvation diet would have been very easily identified as such (and we know that there must have been some, as conditions like Prader Willi are not modern inventions, and are common enough that there would have been cases among the concentration camp population). It seems pretty obvious that these people likely died in the horrific experiments done by the likes of Mengele and thus did not live to see the camps liberated in the first place. Interestingly though, if you look at photos of CC inmates after release, many are not particularly thin. Not vastly overweight but not as thin as you might expect given the calorie regime. This fits with what we know about weight loss and how variable it is.

I think there’s something in this, as a healthy size 12, exercising regularly I was told I was clinically obese, according to the scales.
As a child I weighed almost the same as an adult as I developed early and it led to my Mum putting me on a diet (it was the 70’s!)
I am extraordinarily active, regularly walk 10-15k a day, have done crossfit, boot camp, exercised all my life and really struggle to stay within a size 14 now.
I have a healthy appetite but don’t eat loads of sweets and chocolate, crisps now and again but thats it.
my wrists and ring sizes are often larger than most men and despite being short I have size 7.5 feet.
I have always believed my frame must make a difference. Some of my friends have wrists half the size of mine.

No. It is not genuinely impossible.
Extremely hard and requiring supplements and direct medical supervision is not the same thing as impossible.

I think there are so many factors. But a big one is medication and the rise of plastics and industrialisation etc. The world is full of endocrine disprutors and obesogens that just didn't exist a few hundred years ago and existed in much smaller quantities even 50 years ago.. Before the invention of modern medicine and the NHS, what percentage of the population were on any sort of medication at all, beyond herbal remedies and the snake oils that people bought in shops before regulations came in properly? So many medications cause weight gain it's crazy (and this in itself is interesting - why do they almost never cause weight loss but always weight gain?). And with so many on them they're ending up in the water supply because our water systems weren't designed to filter them out. So we're all being subject to them whether we're taking them or not. Some people are still largely immune. But those of us who always had a tendency to gain weight are finding it harder and harder.

There is evidence that basal metabolic rate is falling - we are burning less even when we take activity levels into account. And one study found that people living in an African tribe that spend their days hunting with spears and washing clothes by hand don't actually burn more calories than sedentary westerners which I find fascinating. It helps us piece together what's actually going on.

If you are overweight and gaining weight on 700 calories a day do you really think you can be slim living forever on 200 or 300 calories a day? You will not lose any great amount cutting to 600 or 500 due to metabolic adaptation. You will lose a little then plateau. You will not get all of the weight off before you are on an amount that cannot sustain any amount of daily activity (not that people eating so little will be able to do much). People with conditions like Hypothalamic Damage and Prader Willi are in this situation. They will never be slim through diet or exercise intervention. It is literally impossible whether you understand these conditions or not.

I did Weight Watchers 13 years ago, went from 10st5lb to 8st 5lb. I am 5ft 1.5 in tall. I was a size 6-8 at that weight. I could have lost another stone and technically still have been a healthy weight. But I would have looked awful, because I have a medium large frame, broad shoulders, wide hips, big boobs, big bum. I come from farming stock. Was always sturdy and strong as a child. I kept the weight off for 2 years, but incidentally I’m now 2st heavier than when I started WW. Yes you can lose weight on a low calorie diet but it is doomed to fail in the long run, because you have permanently altered your metabolism on the LCD.. Your body will fight back, especially when you are hypothyroid like me. Diets don’t work.

Do people get cancer because they are fat or because their diet is poor? How about people who are skinny fat.

I haven’t read the whole thread. But I am v fat and my friend is v thin. I eat much less than her and am much more active. We’ve decided that our metabolisms are to blame. Mine is v slow/sluggish and hers is v fast.

Not such thing as "naturally fat" or "naturally thin".

Everyone who regularly consumes more calories than they expend will be fat and everyone who regularly consumes fewer calories than they expend will be thin.

Mmmm, not quite the full picture.

You can find two people of equal fitness and activity and similar body shape who eat exactly the same diet and one can be fatter than the other. Genetics and epigenetics have a lot to answer for.

The Van Tulliken identical twins are very interesting in this respect. And there is fascinating stuff in the genetics of descendants of survivors of starvation, eg Jewish people from concentration camps.

That is not possible.

If you haven't got a medical condition such as hypothyroidism or Prader-Willi syndrome (either of which would cause multiple and severe symptoms in addition to obesity), you must be in denial about how much you eat.

Your metabolism theory doesn't work either. Obese people are able to eat more without putting on weight than thin people. They have a faster metabolism, because carrying, processing and maintaining the additional weight increases the metabolic rate. Dieters find losing weight harder as they get slimmer, because a smaller body doesn't have to work as hard to function.

There can be small differences in the metabolic rate of two different people even if they are exactly the same age, sex height and build and they are living exactly the same life and eating exactly the same diet.

That small difference in natural metabolic rate might result in one being slightly heavier than the other, but it will not result in one of them being fat and the other being thin.

Depends what time period you're talking about. Also the difference can be significant, it isn't always small.

From Google tonight but I have read up in some detail on these epigenetic effects.

Basically, if your mother starved while pregnant with you, you were very likely to become obese whatever you do. These effects can go down multiple generations.,

The Dutch Hunger Winter (1944–1945): During WWII, a Nazi food blockade led to severe starvation in Western Holland. Studies on the Dutch Famine revealed that women who were pregnant during the famine gave birth to children who later experienced higher rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. These children were found to have altered DNA methylation of specific growth genes (such as the IGF2 gene) compared to their unexposed siblings. Furthermore, their descendants—the grand-offspring—also exhibited altered metabolic traits and body mass indexes

It is more likely gut microbiome-related.

"The interplay between osteoporosis and body weight is a critical factor in bone health. Bones rely on mechanical stress from body weight to maintain their strength and density. Both low body weight and obesity can pose risks to bone health, albeit in different ways.

For those with low body weight, bones may not receive adequate stress to maintain their density, leading to weaker bones."

Osteoporosis and Body Weight: Tipping the Scales on Bone Health - Osteo Empowerment

Of course it's possible - there are loads of studies that show that metabolic rate varies massively from one person to another, and from one animal to another. And studies showing animals ending up with vastly different outcomes regarding weight despite being on identical diets and exercise regimes. Plus studies which show that the same animal can become obese on the same diet they were once thin on, following certain medical procedures such as injecting insulin, removing the ovaries, damaging the hypothalamus etc. All of these things typically cause weight gain, and sometimes vast weight gain, without any change in diet at all. Hence why so many women gain so much weight following a hysterectomy.

Regarding hypothyroidism, it is frequently left undiagnosed for years (or people are prevented from getting treatment because their labs don't meet some random value where the condition is said to begin even when this value can be completely different depending on what country you're in) as are most conditions that cause weight issues - even the common ones! When even common conditions like PMOS (formerly known as PCOS) take an average of 10 years to diagnose despite the fact that they affect 10% of the adult female population, is it really so hard to believe that there might be millions of people living with undiagnosed conditions at any one time? Why do people have so much faith in doctors given their track record on these matters?!

There are loads of possible causes. Different levels of insulin response will affect this too, as just one example. Insulin is a fat storage hormone and people who have issues with insulin will generally gain weight far more easily than those that don't (to be fair, I'm sure there is a link between insulin and gut microbiome). I remember watching a Youtube tutorial on this by a doctor who said that studies showed that some people respond to steamed cauliflour in the same way that others respond to chocolate fudge cake. If you're in the former group, heaven help you - you will be judged as if you're eating the cake even when you're only eating the cauliflour.

Or maybe it wasn't studies in this case but a more formal analysis of her own patients - I can't remember and should probably look it up sometime but it did stick in my head.

And it is thought the different gut bacteria may be driving much of this, including the actual desire for, as per your example, chocolate cake.

Yes, entirely possible. So many theories and so much we still don't know.

Not true - there are loads of conditions that cause obesity on quantities of food that are not enough to prevent malnutrition without supplementing vitamins etc and there will still likely be issues cause by eating what is paradoxically too much and too little food simultaneously.

People with Hypothalamic Obesity, Prader Willi, Cushings will find it more or less impossible to maintain what would normally be considered a healthy weight even on permanent diets of less than 1000 calories a day.

This. I have 3 DC of which 2 are DD, 2 years apart. They eat the same things. The older one is thin to the point of being wiry, and the younger one is heavier set, and in particular has a bit of a belly (which upsets her). They are 12 and 10.
Having brought them up in exactly the same way (same food, same levels of exercise), it is very obvious to me that there are different body types at birth. My 10 year old is not overweight yet (just a bit thick set), but sadly, I can see that she will have to work quite hard when she grows up to stay on the right side of this, and will never be what is called 'slim'.