I’m talking about healthy same-sex individuals.
What are the biological reasons that people can gain weight at faster/slower rates than others?
Is it really true that basal metabolic rates differ in humans (but wouldn’t that mean that fundemental chemical processes are carried out differently?) of the same sex?
And why do experts in the field say that to gain weight, more carbohydrates have to be consumed, instead of fats? Aren’t fats deposited more efficiently across the body?
–Xavier.
Metabolic rates can fluctuate for a single individual. Amount and type of food as well as amount of excercise are among the easiest ways to influence the metabolism.
Still there are diferences even among people for whom all these variables seem to be equivalent. Because the metabolism can fluctuate based on environment, its not hard to conceive that individuals may have different baselines as well.
I think carbs help gain weight faster because they are simpler structures and easier for your body to break down and use. If you eat pig fat its not deposited in your body next to cow fat, chicken fat etc…its all processed and turned into your bodies own fats.
hmmm, your reasoning does not support your claim.
or am i not reading you right?
genetics
age
amount of body fat compared to muscle tissue
activity level
chortisol (im no doc) is a hormone (released during stress or sleep, again i’m no doc) that apparently influences how well one metabolises.
and i believe you will hear carbs help weight gain, because they cause the blood sugar to drop, which triggers insulin, which is a hormone that causes the body to store fat/energy.
sorry, i can’t help much.
The amount of muscle that a person carries naturally varies among people. That can be a major factor in metabolic differences.
Individuals vary their metabolic rates in many different ways. If you deprive your body of food (fasting diets), it tends to slow your metabolism down because your body’s natural defenses think that you are starving and cannot find food. It slows down so that you can live longer. Once a good food source is detected by the body, it increases the metabolism. Where we get into trouble is when we fast and we get to the point where our bodies begin to wonder “isn’t there food?” The body slows down weight loss and we hit a plateau. When we go back to eating after a diet, we tend to go right back to the way we were eating before the diet, and so the body hasn’t quite upped the metabolism so more food is consumed than is used by the body and it is stored in fat. That’s why when you diet, you hit the plateaus, and if you abruptly stop a diet, that you gain back the weight.
Other things can affect your metabolism as well. Your health, your mental health, hormone levels, enzyme levels, your age and even your genetic disposition.
There are people with various metabolic disorders which can turn off or severely depress the metabolism causing these individuals to become morbidly obese.
What this means is that if you see an individual weighing 500 pounds… chances are that he/she didn’t get that way just by eating and no exercise. Usually morbid obesity like that is unhealthy nutrition and low/nonexistant metabolism.
The reverse can be true. If the metabolism is very high, the person usually is abnormally skinny. Not to be confused with Anorexia which is more of a psychological nature. There are people - you know them - who can eat anything they want, and as much as they want and they won’t gain an ounce. These people are usually hyperactive.
The amount of muscle tissue does not really figure into this as muscle tissue. How it figures in is that most people with a lot of muscle tissue are very active. They usually watch more what they eat and they tend to eat food that is easier to metabolize. The combination of these is what effects the metabolism. Muscles tend to use more food, so the body tends to have to metabolize it faster. If an active person ate so that what they ate provides more than enough fuel for the body, it would store the excess as fat and that person would be heavier.
(I’m a biologist by education… and I’m also one of the people with a very slow metabolism due to lowered thyroxin levels. I’m a low normal but if I lost much more production, I’d need medication. My sister is being medicated for hypothyroid - abnormally low thyroxin levels. Hypothyroid, BTW is hereditary.)