Everyone seemingly has a friend, a co-worker or a cousin that eats anything and everything in sight yet still doesn’t put on even a single pound of fat!
Now there is a chance that these individuals have very fast metabolisms just like on the other end of things there are people that have slower metabolisms, meaning genetics may absolutely be playing a role here.
However, there are a bunch of other questions to ask yourself if you find that you’re feeling discouraged or possibly even jealous or envious that some people seem to be able to eat an absolute ton and still stay lean.
One is, how much time are you spending with these people and how many meals are you actually seeing them eat?
I remember I had a client a while back that went on vacation with some friends and she felt super discouraged because her friend that was fairly lean was really indulging in food in her opinion. However, you can’t extrapolate vacation eating to how someone eats in their everyday life because that would be like saying, ‘I can’t believe how my friend makes any money because all they do is lounge at the beach all day.’
Folks’ eating and drinking habits typically shift a fair bit while they’re on vacation because by definition they’re on vacation.
Another example would be every time you go out with a specific friend to a restaurant they always order the pasta and dessert.
How often do you go out to dinner with this individual?
Let’s say for arguments sake it’s once a week which is a lot, it’s likely not that often but we’ll use that as an example. If we eat 3 meals per day that means you’re seeing 1 meal out of 21 for the entire week…that’s less than 5% of their whole diet statistically.
If they eat pasta and dessert most times you see them, that doesn’t mean that they eat pasta and dessert every day. If we applied the same thought process to going out for drinks with friends on a Friday night and your buddy has 6 beers every Friday…you don’t then think that he has 6 beers every single night of the week, you think well it’s Friday and we’re having a bunch of social pints.
Let’s take this a step further because I think this is interesting to think about…if you have a partner and you live with them, even if you eat breakfast and dinner together every single day, you don’t know what or how they’re eating 33% of the time because you guys don’t eat lunch together. I’ve had this happen with client couples before where the wife might say, ‘I don’t understand how my husband is overweight because we eat breakfast and dinner together and I make super healthful food.’ Lunch and daytime snacking can really add up and again, breakfast and dinner are only 66% of someone’s intake so 33% of the time ya just don’t know.
The last example I’ll share with you guys on this is an overweight co-worker that eats nothing but salads…all you see them eating is salads and yet they’re overweight. There might be a slightly slower metabolism at play here, however you know that this individual is not eating solely salads outside of work because their body composition is reflecting something completely different.
This isn’t about judgement, the point here is that we just don’t know how folks are truly eating day to day without being with them literally 24/7. So someone’s body composition is actually the best reflection of their calorie intake and movement habits. Yes there are some outliers that have faster and slower metabolisms, but they are a lot more rare than we’d like to think!
Folks with fast metabolisms typically move more, they’re often quite active, even the way someone talks and communicates can reveal this…
Look at someone like Mr. Rodgers, I’m sure you remember him…amazing documentary by the way one of my favourites, but if you look at how he talks and moves everything is done ultra-slow. The dude is super calm, super laid back and just naturally does everything essentially in slow motion!
Then you look at someone who’s super animated, talks with their hands, is really expressive even in their faces and is always on the go doing lots of things. There is a MASSIVE difference in calories burned between individuals like this and we’re not even talking about workouts here. Think about how much of a difference in calorie requirements that would be between two individuals like this over the course of a week, month, year, 10 years, a lifetime…
Hypothetically these two individuals could have the exact same inherent metabolism, but just the way that they interact on a daily basis and live their lives would change calorie requirements drastically!
Everyone knows folks that are just busy bodies, they rarely sit still, they’re always doing something and essentially just almost always moving even when they’re supposedly relaxing. On the contrary we all know people that are just naturally more still, these folks are typically home bodies and on average they move a lot less and they live their lives at a slower pace…
If you drive your car more, you’re going to need to fill up the gas tank more often, however if it sits in your garage most of the time, you’re not going to be using a whole lot of fuel.
There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here, I just want to paint a clearer picture around what really plays into this whole metabolism and calorie intake thing, because I think that some folks feel like they drew the short end of the straw, however there are just so many overlooked factors at play here.
Another really important point to mention is that we humans are really bad at assessing and approximating calorie intake and expenditure. We’re simply not wired or built to do this accurately, so what usually happens is that folks whom are underweight tend to overestimate their calorie intake and folks whom are overweight tend to underestimate their calorie intake. There have been a bunch of studies done on this…
Sometimes I have my clients use a food diary as an intake awareness tool and they’re almost always surprised by how much more they’re eating than they originally thought and these are highly motivated, highly aware folks by definition because they’ve sought me out and decided to work with me.
On the other end of spectrum there’s a large population of typically men, underweight or skinny men that want to put on muscle. They lift weights and they say they’re eating a ton and then when you really break it down with these dudes, they’re usually eating far less than they think. They’re like, ‘Oh man, I’m so full all the time’ and it’s like you had an average of 2500 calories per day this week, no wonder you’re not putting on any weight!
Now there are some people that are a little more accurate around their calorie intake, but not necessarily because they’re actively counting their calories, they’re probably just fairly in tune with hunger and satiation signals. These folks usually land in the middle, meaning they’re not overweight or underweight but typically of a healthful bodyweight which totally makes sense.
Now an important psychological factor to be aware of on this topic and essentially every topic is that we have very favourable memories.
For example, let’s say you have weight loss in the back of your mind as a goal…you’re probably going to bias your memory towards your healthful lower calorie meal choices and sort of push to the side or more often tend to forget your higher calorie food decisions.
We do this in relationships too, we seem to always remember all the great things we’ve done for other people and seem to forget when we haven’t taken that extra step or gone out of our way to support someone…this isn’t a character flaw, it’s just the way our brains our wired.
It’s interesting, I get all of my clients to fill out a questionnaire before they start working with me in order to be sure that we’re the right fit for one another and one of the questions is, ’What are you eating now, what’s an example of a normal day?’
Sometimes I get answers that just don’t add up, for example someone has 40 lbs to lose but in their questionnaire an example of their daily intake is…
-3 eggs and oatmeal for breakfast
-A salad with chicken breast for lunch
-A piece of fish with rice and vegetables for dinner
This is a prime example of that favourable memory in action because if this was how an individual ate on a daily basis, we wouldn’t even be talking being that they’d be killing it body composition wise. In fact, they would likely be under-eating, so this whole favourable memory thing is an important one when it comes to this topic.
Something to keep in mind is that someone with a really small appetite is going to think that less food is a lot more than someone with a large appetite…this is just an opinion which is very different from what actually is.
So the truth is that when we equate for things like calorie intake and calorie expenditure, the vast majority of folks are more similar than different. Yes there are outliers but they’re just that, outliers. They are the exception to the rule and we love to magnify the outliers because it makes for an interesting story or conversation…
‘Oh Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team he was cut’…well he’s an exception, he’s Michael Jordan and also this story isn’t actually true. Jordan didn’t make the varsity team as a sophomore meaning, he was in grade 10 and he didn’t quite make the senior team so he played with the appropriate aged folks vs. playing up with the seniors, but stories like this get spread and they’re like, Michael Jordan got cut and it’s like well…not really.
Now I want to wrap up here with some good news, especially for the folks that think they fall into the normal or even slower metabolism category…
I was overweight when I was younger and it essentially gave me more incentive to eat healthier because my body composition reflected my intake and I wanted to be leaner. Therefore, I needed to develop healthful eating skills at a younger age if I wanted to look the way I wanted to look.
On the other hand if you take someone who can literally eat anything they want and they don’t have that external or visual drive to eat more healthfully, if all of sudden they become less active when they’re older and start to put on weight, they don’t have the skills in place to remedy that situation. Not only do they not have those skills, they’ve got 30, 40 or 50 years of poor habits working against them now, so it’s that much harder for an individual like this to shift their lifestyle at that point in time because they’re so used to just not giving a second thought to their eating habits.
So my point is that maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that you don’t have the fastest metabolism on earth and what you eat actually reflects your body composition because it just incentive to eat better, so you can frame things in that way too!
I hope you guys found this article useful and it shed some light on the reality of the situation around what might actually be going on when it seems as though so many folks are eating whatever they want and not gaining a pound.
They’re likely not eating as much as you think and/or they might be moving more than you think. Also what it really comes down to is, we just don’t know how someone truly eats on a daily basis unless we’re spending 24/7 with them because these tiny little meal to meal snapshots are just that, snapshots.
It’s sort of like looking at someone’s Instagram account and drawing conclusions about what their life is really like…sure they’re doing whatever they’re doing in their pics, but what are they doing for the other 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds in the day?
