Why some people can never lose the weight

Losing weight is straight forward. You eat a good diet and you work out regularly ensuring you are burning more calories than you care consuming and voila...weight loss will follow.

However, if I had a gold coin for every time someone has told me that they are different and they are the exception to the rule and that no matter how much they work out and eat salads, they are still fat - I'd be very wealthy. I've just been reading an article based on some new research that may just prove those people right. Maybe there are some people out there who have the fat gene and there's nothing hours in the gym can do about it.

Steven Blair, a professor of exercise science has discovered that genes and hormonal balance can have a huge impact on your weight and size. Here's a selection of his findings:

1. Some people have more fat cells
Some people could have as many as twice as many than then next person which would help to explain why they may struggle so much where other find it easy to shed extra weight. Fat cells never go, they can reduce in size but they are always there - waiting to be filled up.

2. The Fat Gene is real
Fatso - that's what the fat gene is called and those with the genes are 60% more likely to be obese than those without. This may explain why some people do so many sports and physical activities and eat and balanced diet and still have a lot of extra body weight.

3. Your mother's pregnancy sealed your fate
If your mum ate very unhealthily during her pregnancy, according to these findings, a sugary and fatty diet can cause havoc to you before you're even born if the womb has higher levels of glucose and free fatty acids floating around than it needs.

There's plenty more nuggets of research in this report which are worth a look but I'm a little skeptical. I'm willing to accept that you don't have to be thin to be fit - slightly overweight people can be fit to but just unable to shift that last 10 pounds. But I'm not convinced yet that fat can be blamed wholly on genes. Maybe this report will convince you?

To discover more on the 13 things you never knew about your weight, read the full article here.


Photograph by insecurity (flickr)