Hereditary Weight Gain

In My Humble Opinion
1

I read about a 620 pound woman this morning who says that she has “lettuce and tomatoes coming out my ears”, and that her weight is due to heriditary factors and not overeating.

In other words, she is telling us she has been trying to lose weight but her system just will not “burn up” (her quotes) the calories.

Okay, fine. But even if her weight is hereditary, couldn’t it have been controlled, or is there the possibility that she at some point in her life decided that since both parents were obese that she would be as well?

To what degree is it possible to fight hereditary obesity?

Quasi

PS: This may belong in GQ, but I couldn’t decide

2

Well, the bottom line has to be that if you don’t eat food, you can’t get fat. Your body cannot create energy (fat).

  • eg. during wartime in occupied Europe in WWII, when and where food was scarce, obesity almost disappeared.
  • eg. ethnic groups such as certain Native Americans, Ethiopians, and (East) Indians, and others, have very low rates of obesity in their native lands (or with their traditional diet). Upon exposure to the Western Diet, and plentiful food supplies, obesity becomes epidemic in these very same populations.

On the other hand, a single genetic mutation in rats or mice can cause them to become massively obese despite the identical caloric intake as their lean brethren. This argues for a strong, almost irresistible, genetic component.

Along the same lines in humans, if you take pairs of identical twins and feed them all a very high calorie diet for say three months, you’ll find that the weight gain is tightly linked within a twin pair but not among twin pairs. That is to say, one pair of twins might gain four and six pounds, while another pair would gain seventeen and twenty pounds. This type of data also suggests a very strong genetic component to maintennance of body weight.

Gotta go. Time for dinner.

P.S. I think this would have been good GQ fodder.

3

I gain weight easily and lose it slowly, so yes metabolism (to the extent it is hereditarily determined) does make a difference, but it doesn’t make 600+ lbs of difference. In the end it’s all about caloric intake. To maintain a 620 lb weight for a 5’ 7", sedentary 40 year old woman would take over 4300 calories per day! Even assuming she’s got a reeeal slow metabolism just to keep her body temperature going you’re still talking in the high 3000’s or low 4000,s per day.

To eat this may calories in vegetables you’d have to be consuming a few bushel baskets of veggies a day. Maybe tomatoes and lettuce are coming out of her ears but if you used a Q-tip on this woman I’d bet you’ve find quite a few pizzas and chocolate bars stuck in there as well.

http://www.caloriecontrol.org/calcalcs.html

4

I am about to drop 5 more pounds of fat just laughing at the final sentence of your post. WAY funny!!! :smiley:

Thanks!

Quasi

5

According to the link that andros posted, I need 3135 to maintain my weight. Which is interesting because at most I eat 1500 calories a day, and up until this week, I lifted weights twice a week and did kickboxing on Saturdays. At my peak, I was working out 5 times a week and staying away from fatty foods. And I didn’t lose a single pound. My grandmother is constantly dieting, and she has a real difficult time losing weight too.
So yeah, I think that weight gain/loss can be hereditary.

6

This topic was hashed over in depth in this thread if you’re interested in a long read :).

7

I’ve been calculating calories for over 20 years and I’ve gotten good enough at it that I am about 95% accurate (even guessing and then checking calorie references) in totaling calories at the end of the day. I don’t know how much you weigh but I would willing to wager you consume many more calories on average than you may realize. Human metabolism based variations in burning calories don’t typically swing more than 20% either way from slower to faster burning metabolisms even adjusting for glandular conditions and given similar body types and levels of exercise.
If you are eating 1500 a calories a day there is no possible way you could be overweight unless are bedridden or 3 feet tall. Given your stated consumption and assuming you are between 5’ 5" to 5’ 10" you are talking about a weight of 250 to 270 lbs. on 1500 calories a day with the moderate level of exercise you describe.

I don’t want to seem disagreeable but this is utterly and flatly impossible. BTW 1500 is not that much and I could easily go past that with a steak dinner, salad and two drinks without not even adding dessert. I don’t know how you are calculating calories but you are at least 1000 calories off somewhere in your calculations.

8

I’m with pepperlandgirl. For over a year I kept a diary of everything I ate. For most days (probably 5 out of 7) I had complete information including total calories and percentage of fat. My average intake was 1600 per day, and about 20% from fat. At my weight I should need at least 3000 to maintain if I was in a coma, according to the BMR charts in the Exercise Physiology textbook I was using at the time for class. At the time I also was a student in off campus housing, which meant a mile or two of walking every day. I lost about 10 pounds.

There are metabolic/hormonal issues that can cause this sort of thing, which I had diagnosed later.

I don’t think this needs to become another low-carb vs. pyramid thread, but I will say that there are so many things that we do not know about human nutrition that it amazes me the stuff we believe.

After 10 years of researching my own illness and reading voraciously on the subject of nutrition and human performance I have come up with a couple of answers that work for me, and believe that until they can accurately determine how many calories an obese person burns while sleeping, those charts will never be useful or worth the paper they are printed on.

9

Ummmm…how is the number of calories an overweight person burns during sleep significantly different than a non-overweight person’s calorie consumption at rest or any more difficult to calculate? You have a basal metabolic rate necessary to keep the body temperature at some specified constant and the autonomic physiological functions like respiration etc. going. For a given body weight and composition there is a range of calories necessary to maintain the aforesaid life support functions at rest. Even if a non-fat person with a higher muscle to fat ratio and a speedier metabolism burns few more calories per lb of weight at rest (and it would only be a few) it is not enough of a difference at rest to challenge or make invalid the calorie average needed to maintain a specific amount of weight.

These “I don’t eat very much at all but I gain or can’t lose” claims have been tested and invariably the person is consuming a lot more calories a day than they realize. Human beings are just not that different in the thermodynamic requirements of bodies to maintain a set amount of weight.

10

astro, all I’m saying is that I don’t buy it. It is very easy to manipulate statistics in studies. It is also very easy to only look at the mean or median and ignore the fringes.

There is no way to feed a test subject X number of calories, monitor their oxygen intake, and predict exactly how many ounces they will gain or lose. There are too many other factors and individual differences to make that possible. Science isn’t there yet.

There are too many differences between elite athletes with a lean body mass above 85% (who provide much of the data which those charts are based on) and someone with a lean body mass of 20% to extrapolate an absolutely accurate BMR, IMHO.

My personal experience with it is that after years of following the conventional wisdom about what I should be doing to lose weight and become healthier, including basing my caloric intake on what I should need to maintain my desired weight at my current activity level.

It is impossible to self report down to the calorie how much my daily intake was. However, there is no way that I ate triple that number accidentally, consistently over many months.

I only got worse, eventually to the point that I had to begin taking medication to control my blood sugar.

In the last year I made changes (with the blessing of my endocrinologist, thanks to new research) which put me squarely at risk for greater disease, according to the generally accepted idea of nutrition. I am now healthier than I have been since I was 17, and have been able to cut my medications in half.

My experience is mine alone, and since no other human being has exactly my body, genes, or medical history, it will never be reproducible in a lab. I don’t really believe that I am that unique, but the point is that it is unreproducible, because every person is just a little bit different.

I’m not particularly interested in debating it, it’s been done to death already, and will continue to be until the end of time. It’s just my opinion.

11

People can absolutly be genetically predisposed to being heavier, or having a larger body frame/size.

Additionally, people can have diseases such as diabetes or hypothyroidism which can contribute to weight gain.

However, in the end, weight maitenence comes down to two things. Eat less. Exercise more.

You don’t just wake up one day weighing 620 lbs - you have to have worked at it for a while. If this woman is genetically predisposed to be larger, she should have noticed this at 250 lbs. or 300. or 400. or 500 for heavens sake.

Shes morbidly obese, and looking for an out.