I’m not counting calories at all anymore.
That nutrition is magic.
Boatloads, and she got it very quickly. She was perfectly normal, although naturally very lean (as is the whole family). Then she got sick after a vacation and dropped a lot of weight. People started telling her how great she looked, (we live in Los Angeles, she goes to private school with the children of Hollywood superstars. The standards are different; insanely thin is a good thing here) and combined with her frustration and issues over her struggles with middle school, she decided to hang on to the skinny. (5’8", 105, delicate bones.)
Her mother is VERY VERY VERY savvy about kids in general and psychological disorders, and quickly realized where it was headed and got her help, which is how they managed to get her eating so quickly, I think. But it’s a lot of management and it’s driving her mother crazy because she just can’t relax for a second.
She IS burning it. That’s why Person A can eat 4000 calories and not gain an ounce and Person B can eat 2000 calories and gain a pound - they burn at different rates.
The fact that she’s burning that much when the weight she’s at is unnaturally low is the concern, but again, she’s 14.
Then what is the point of the anecdote? You’re surprised there are people who burn more calories than normal for their age and weight?
Google ‘overfeeding study’ for any number.
Clearly you are not familiar with the theory of adaptive thermogenesis. Many studies have indicated that body weight can remain stable, or fluctuate much less than expected, when caloric intake is increased or decreased (even vastly). People are not mathematical sums who will all lose/gain x lbs within x weeks by reducing/increasing calories by x daily. Blah blah thermodynamics, I know, but we are not closed systems.
My personal experience is such. When I overeat (which I often do), I feel antsy and can’t stop fidgeting, feel overheated, often to the point of sweating in normal temperatures, and my skin is hot to the touch. One time I was on a medically supervised diet of 4000 calories daily for about a month (starting at 94 lbs and sedentary at the time). Got all the above symptoms, and I gained less than 10 lbs, which was not typical at all, but various tests over the years have shown me to be healthy and I don’t appear to have any issues with absorbing nutrients, etc. Numerous medical professionals have told me I have a ‘very fast metabolism’ so I’ve assumed it’s an acceptable technical term.
Right now I am active (work on my feet, walk a fair amount, do lots of yoga, lift weights a little) and I am consuming about 3000 calories per day to maintain at 105 lbs, still underweight for my height. I used to eat the same and not exercise at all, and I weighed a few pounds less then. I’ve put on muscle from weight-bearing exercise.
Curious, how much weight have you lost since you stopped keeping track of how much you eat?
I call bullshit on this. You show up in A LOT of weight/appearance threads, have mentioned hanging out on low-carb message boards, admit to having issues regarding your attractiveness, and generally seem to put a lot of thought into this for a 25 year old who claims to be naturally slim. I suspect there is more going on that you are admitting here, but I hope that you are admitting it to yourself. If you are or have been anorexic, your weight is not the normal result of a fast metabolism, and it won’t help you to rationalize that it is. It’s a tricky disease, and one that does not go away entirely. if you see it coming up, you have to recognize that, put it into words, and face it straight on using whatever resources you’ve got.
While your reply may be technically correct in the strictest sense, I can say that I don’t recall ever knowing a single person suffering from anorexia nervosa who was not deceptive.
mmm
No, she isn’t. She’s either purging or exercising like crazy in private.
And while of course it’s true that no two people have the exact same metabolism, the differences are very VERY minor. Your scenario where one person eats twice as much as another yet does not gain weight is simply preposterous.
It may SOUND preposterous; however, my room mate (60 year old male) is about 5’4" and weighs around 143. This guy eats probably three times the calories I do and absolutely has trouble keeping weight on. I see him every day and see him get on the scale every day. He’ll have bacon, eggs and a bagel; soup and sandwich for lunch; maybe half of or a whole pizza for supper. He remains the same weight or goes down a couple of pounds quite frequently. Completely baffling.
So you’ve done research papers on this? Have you been published?
Because the one thing I know about the human body is that we don’t know a tenth of what is going on in it. We’re discovering new things every day.
It may SOUND preposterous; however, my room mate (60 year old male) is about 5’4" and weighs around 143. This guy eats probably three times the calories I do and absolutely has trouble keeping weight on. I see him every day and see him get on the scale every day. He’ll have bacon, eggs and a bagel; soup and sandwich for lunch; maybe half of or a whole pizza for supper. He remains the same weight or goes down a couple of pounds quite frequently. Completely baffling. And trust me, he is not purging and he does not work out…not even a little bit!
Why is a 60 year old skinnny guy so obsessed with his weight that he weighs himself every day…in front of other people?
This. Anorexia is fundamentally about lying. “Oh, I just ate.” “I’m meeting someone for dinner after this.” “Sorry, my stomach is feeling funny, I’ll stick to water.” That’s all you do all day, to everyone. You learn how to throw food away when nobody is looking, how to pick out low-calorie bits from your meals so it looks like you are eating, how to take a few bits and leave the rest. And even more insidiously, you learn how to lie to yourself. You really believe your stomach feels too funny to eat, or that you just had a huge meal (which is actually probably a sandwich) or that you really don’t want to eat more. Deception becomes a part of the fabric of your life. Heck, I think anorexia is about killing yourself without admitting to yourself that you are trying to kill yourself. It’s lies all the way down.
It’s likely that her mom is making excuses or enabling. If she really is that knowledgable about adolescent mental health, her daughter’s anorexia was probably difficult for her to process. Or it could be that the family is not as “naturally slim” as you’d think. Often a family with a boatload of problems will designate one person as the “sick” one to hide whatever weird stuff is going on. You have no idea what goes on behind closed doors. But whatever it is, it’s not a person eating 4,000 calories on a sustained basis and not gaining anything.
That strikes me as weird, too. I don’t know what my husband did or ate all day every day, or how often he weighed himself.
It almost seems like showing off… something.
I’m sure it feels good to type out a nice generic “no two snowflakes are exactly alike” sentiment like that, but it’s totally wrong. Anorexics are like alcoholics – there’s a huge diversity of symptoms and circumstances, but the fundamental pattern of the disease is the same. When your brain is telling you to drink / lose weight at all costs, unless you are surrounded by the most codependent enablers on earth, you’re going to have to hide your behavior with lies and deception. Because people aren’t stupid: they know when other people are going to see their behavior as unhealthy and possibly try to stop them. But they have a far more primitive driving force telling them they must continue at all costs, so there’s only one answer.
I unfortunately have more personal experience with anorexia than I would like. It’s an incredibly misunderstood condition.
A “hundred times” harder? Really? How did you calculate this?
Also, isn’t it possible that “most people” are working harder than you to obtain and maintain a healthy weight? Isn’t that a more logical explanation than that the laws of thermogenics magically just don’t apply in your case?
Who said every single person with a disorder behaves exactly like every other person who has the same disorder? What everyone here is telling you, people I would hazard to guess have more experience dealing with anorexics than you do, is that your characterization of this girl you heard about from a friend as being “very honest” about her anorexia is probably off. Part of the disease is having distinguishing characteristics that are shared by others with the same disease, or don’t you get that? Yes, anorexics lie. They deny that they have a problem. They also typically have body dysmorphic disorder. Saying that individuals who have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder exhibit the same behaviors is not preposterous. It’s like you’re jumping down people’s throats for the ridiculously broad statement that “alcoholics have a problem with alcohol”. Just because you read one book that jives with your idea that it’s hard for fat people to lose weight doesn’t mean you’re an expert on nutrition.
I think people’s average caloric burn rates vary far more than you’re claiming. Haven’t you ever known a tall super skinny guy who eats like a horse but stays super skinny? That was me in my early to mid twenties. I literally could not gain weight, despite hardly exercising and eating everything I could get my hands on. In my late twenties, I suddenly put on 30 pounds over a period of about 6-12 months (by this point, I was exercising regularly and getting far more exercise than in my early twenties), not doing a single thing differently than before. No complaint, as the weight was much needed, but my metabolism was clearly running much higher than most people’s. Then it slowed down a peg, with visible results. There’s no possible way to explain that with a universal calories in vs. calories out formula: if some of my friends had eaten like I did, they’d have been 300 pounds.
I’ve had several friends who were the same way – crazy skinny, but who ate as much or more than my other friends. (One in particular was just a freak of nature – that guy was a bottomless pit when it came to food.)
Metabolism matters, which is why I suspect exercise has a much larger effect than the direct calorie burn calculations people do. And some people simply have to work harder to maintain a given weight than others. It’s not fair, but it’s life.