CarbSmart Podcast Episode 31 – People Who Gain Weight Easily and People Who Don’t

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Show Notes for Podcast 31: People Who Gain Weight Easily and People Who Don’t

Welcome to the CarbSmart Podcast, where your decision to embrace low-carb nutrition becomes a fun and delicious lifestyle. I’m your host, Dana Carpender, here to guide you through the ins and outs of everything, low carb or to talk to the people who can.

Remember the old nursery rhyme about how Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean?

While the historical roots of that rhyme are misty, it does suggest that people are metabolically different, something that apparently has been recognized for a long time.

So let’s talk about it.

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The dumbest weight loss advice I have ever heard was just find a thin person and eat what they’re eating.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, there was a girl in my grade named Gail. Gail was skinny. Not just slim skinny. She got as much razzing for being so skinny as I did for being chubby. Lots of jokes about how if you could just melt us down and stir us together, we’d both come out the right size. Can you hear me rolling my eyes?

Gail just couldn’t gain weight. It wasn’t in her physiology so far as I could see. Just like any other kid, she wasn’t turning down cookies or avoiding the ice cream truck. Her body just burned it off at a great rate.

In the 1980s, I had a boyfriend named Tom. Tom was six seven and weighed 150 pounds. For those of you in the civilized world, that’s 200.7 centimeters and 68 kilos. Tom was very tall. Very thin. Yes, skinny. We were once out shopping for jeans for him when a strange woman took advantage of his being in the dressing room to come over and whisper. How can you be with someone like that? I’d hate him for being able to eat all the time.

Charming, but Tom could eat all the time. Indeed. He needed to eat all the time. I used to think he’d gotten a shrew gene patched in somehow, and had to eat his own body weight every 12 hours or starve.

To give you an idea. We’d go out to a Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood every Tuesday, because that was when they had the all you could eat buffet. I’d have one average plate of food. Tom would eat six heaping plates full. When we got back to his place, he’d eat an entire pint of Haagen-Dazs. I wasn’t eating that stuff. It was full of sugar and anyway, it would make me fat. An hour later, Tom would be saying, do you think we should order a pizza? He never gained an ounce.

He couldn’t. Sadly, Tom died a couple of years back. Last I saw Tom was during the 2020 campaign season when I was going door to door, getting out the vote and just happened to be assigned to his neighborhood. He was in his late fifties and if he gained five pounds since the eighties, I’d be surprised still a rail in Mason school.

Another student, a guy named Steve who was quite thin, not quite like Tom, but thin, knowing that I had a long-term interest in nutrition, asked me if I knew how he could gain weight. I told him honestly that in my experience, it was harder for the genetically thin to gain weight than it was for the genetically fat to lose it.

I recommended he start lifting weights to gain a little bulk and definition, but that was about all I had to offer. Why am I telling you about all these skinny people? Because no one blamed them for being so skinny. No one shook their heads and clucked their tongues and thought they must just not eat enough calories.

Nope. They might be seen as outliers, but they were not seen as being weak-willed or emotionally crippled. They were just skinny. But those of us who gain weight easily indeed, who gain weight eating a fraction of what some of the congenitally thin do are blamed for being how we are, it’s character flaw. We could fix it if we just tried.

Between the ages of 19 when I quit sugar and white flour and 36 when I went low carb, I was your standard health food type. Healthy whole grains, fruits and vegetables, some poultry, water pack tuna and lightly-breaded fish filets. I got lots of exercise, especially power walking while pumping five-pound weights.

I was young and fit, yet I fought to keep down to a size 12. I certainly never got skinny, and I eventually ballooned to a size 20 on that diet. I have known people who, if they were trying to lose weight by restricting calories and listen to my podcast on calories and calories out, I. I’ve known people who had to go below 600 calories per day well below a starvation diet.

I have met people in the low carb community who have by going low carb, lost a hundred or even 200 pounds, but are still morbidly obese. They eat carefully, yet they are stuck.

Meanwhile, people like Tom are trying to eat sufficient food to not waste away. I will insert here that in the past few decades, there has been an increase in the assumption that women who are naturally skinny must have eating disorders.

Years ago, I had a manicure by a young woman who was six feet tall, quite slim, and very beautiful. She’d been a model. But had enrolled in beauty school because she was already being seen as old at 22. I mentioned to her that I was preparing to appear on television because of my writing about low carb diets.

This led to her telling me that people too often assumed that her tall slim frame meant that she must be anorexic. She was not. She was just naturally thin. So adult women are indeed sometimes judged for being skinny. Yet so far as I have noted, even the skinniest men are not assumed to have eating disorders.

I thought of all of this while reading the 1958 book, Eat Fat and Grow Slim. In it, Dr. Richard Mackarness talked about Mr. Fatten-easily versus Mr. Constant-weight. He referenced the work of a professor, sir Charles Dodds. Who was at the time in charge of the Caral Institute of Biochemistry in England, Dodds took people whose weight stayed constant and had them eat two to three times their usual intake.

They did not gain weight. He showed that they were indeed digesting and absorbing the food. Their bodies were simply increasing their metabolisms to burn up the extra calories. This is now known as postprandial thermogenesis, or in English, creating body heat. After eating the extra calories were literally burned off.

Dodds then tried the same thing with people who had a history of gaining and losing and regaining weight and found no increase in metabolism when they increased their food intake, their bodies simply did not handle food the same way as people whose weight remained constant. An hour or two of poking around PubMed and Google showed that it has long since been established that people who are obese or who have been obese in the past have lower postprandial thermogenic response.

This is also the case with people who are insulin resistant, many of whom are also obese. Add this with the advent of GLP-1 drugs, we have proof that there is a hormone that not only keeps blood sugar down, but also causes weight loss. We have a whole class of hormone-based drugs that cause weight loss.

Think about that. Whether GLP-1 drugs turn out to be safe for long-term use or not. There is zero question that those of us who fatten easily and lean toward insulin resistance secrete less GLP-1 than those whose weight is naturally maintained. The truth is that eating the way genetically thin people do will not make us thin.

This is not a character flaw

It is a fundamental difference in the way our bodies work. That doesn’t mean we can’t fight it, and we should, but it does mean that the societal judgment of us as weak-willed. It’s oversimplified to the point of being just plain bigotry. Who knows how many more physiological differences we will discover?

But for now, the takeaway message is that this is not a character issue. We really are biochemically different than naturally slim people.

Have you been at war with your metabolism all your life, or were you slim as kid only to gain weight with middle age and a desk job? Has losing gone smoothly for you? Or are you stuck at a greater weight and size than you’d like?

Let us know in the comments below.

Episode 31 Recipe:

We are once again giving you two recipes with this show, Low-Carb Orange Teriyaki Chicken from 300 Low Carb Slow Cooker Recipes because your slow cooker won’t heat up the house in the summer. And since most teriyaki sauce is sugary, my recipe for Sugar Free Teriyaki Sauce too, just click on the link below or go to carbsmart.com/podcast31recipe.

Click on the link below or go to CarbSmart.com/podcast31recipe and enjoy!

Share this podcast with everyone you think might like it because we want more listeners! And don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell, because you don’t want to miss a single episode! Until next time, stay low carb, happy, and healthy.

Until next time, stay low carb, happy and healthy.