eli5: why is gaining weight so easy but losing weight so hard
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Back in the caveman days we were forced to run around to find food to eat. Because that is no longer true, we eat too much, and run around too little. And so we gain weight.
If the food intake orifice is larger than the removal orifice best to control the intake.
Low Carbohydrates Low Fat protein to suit kgs.
Some people are genetically predisposed to build muscle. To build muscle you need a lot of calories and also fat to protect your joints due to the weight of the muscle, as well as store energy for muscles. For these people, losing weight is hard because their body kicks into starvation mode very easily. Their body wants to be muscular, and muscles are heavy.
You know how you breathe without thinking about it, but you can also control it on purpose when you hold your breath or decide to breathe quickly or slowly?
Your body does that with weight too.
Normally, it takes care of keeping you the right weight on its own. It has a “set weight” it keeps you at a weight just like your house thermostst keeps to always a certain temperature. When you need to eat, you feel really hungry till you eat more. If your body wants potassium it remembers you had bananas before and that had it, so it tells your brain you really really want a banana. When you are full, food doesnt sound nice anymore. This happens all by itself (you dont need to plan it. )
You can decide to ignore what it tells you though. You can refuse to eat the banana and have ice cream instead. Or have no snack at all.
Deciding not to listen to your body is bad. If you hold your breath too long, you can pass out. If you refuse to eat too long, you can die.
Another thing that can go wrong when you eat the wrong things too much or are sick for some reason(lile PCOS) is that the whole body weight system can get broken. You can eat only bad foods until you now really really want cake, not that banana, or chips (salt) instead of water. The thermostat can get stuck at a wrong weight… way too high or too low.
If your set weight is set wrong you body keeps doing its job to keep you at the wrong weight. Now you will be extra hungry at the wrong times or not hungry when you should be. Your weight will stay at the new “set weight” now.
You will get upset about your weight then and start trying to change weight by dieting. But that is hard because now you really really want cake and chips. Vegetables will then sound boring and yucky. If you arent careful, you might convince your body its in danger of starvation becaise of the sudden diet changes. That could make a bigger mess of it all.
As you can see a wrong body weight setting or messed up cravings can make changing your weight on purpose really hard!
I can’t gain weight.
Always been thin. I eat like a pig and work at a pizzeria. Almost 43 now.
Everyone is wired differently. We all have different struggles to fit into a healthy / social niche in modern society.
Survival. There are metabolic disorders where holding a healthy weight is hard, but it’s actually not as fun as it sounds. People picture endless pizza and bread for days.
for me it’s opposite of what you are saying. I have to force feed myself to gain muscle weight. I don’t eat junk food though
Wdym gaining weight is easy? Its the most difficult part for me whenever I try building muscles / going to the gym.
I think the easiest way to see the difference is to learn how mass leaves the body. Water is mainly just borrowed and is neither created nor destroyed, but instead used as a medium of exchange. You lose a small amount of mass as urine, but the vast majority of that is simply water.
The second and primary way to lose mass is by breathing it out. Those long carbon chains in sugar end up eventually leaving your body through exhaling. Imagine eating a cookie. You can chow down on one in a minute. How many breaths do you think it’ll take to exhale the mass of a cookie?
That’s a simple explanation of why gaining weight is much simpler than losing weight. Taking in calories is quick and easy and high calorie food is simple to come by. Losing it, however, mainly requires breathing it out.
Sorry but thats not true for anybody. Can eat whatever the fuck i want and barely gain weight. Stop going to the gym for a few weeks? Here loose 2kg
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