Reply to Skinny people who don't diet but just eat carefully. What is on your plate?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]More of us this applies to should be honest and say we don’t necessarily eat much better than most people who struggle with weight. It’s just we were given a big, BIG leg up with our genes. All women in my family are slender. I build muscle easily and can eat pretty much whatever I want. I can’t pretend like that’s all my doing. And other people work way way harder than me to be thin and have a harder hill to climb if they were handed different genetics. [/quote]

I think this is true. I'm thin, 5'5" and around 115 lbs, and I make no effort to diet at all, though I am very active. I definitely don't view my thinness as an accomplishment and it's always been a bit confusing for me that others do. It took me a while to figure out that for many, if not most, people, the assumption is that if you are thin it's because you "earned" it through diet and exercise. I know for a fact that is not true, because I am thin regardless of what I eat and how much I exercise. In fact, when I was dealing with depression and was eating garbage all the time and not exercising at all, I actually lost weight because that is how my body responds to stress. So definitely not earned.

But I also think it's more complicated than "genetics". I do think that's a huge component, but it's not the whole thing. Case in point: my mom has been obese most of my life. Like to a degree where it impacts her health in serious ways. She has mobility issues and is considered pre-diabetic, and has severe asthma that is likely exacerbated by her weight. She was thin when she was in her 20s. And then she was not. She's been dieting my whole life, and I've seen her lose and gain weight, but I've never seen her thin except in pictures.

I don't know what causes my mom's obesity, exactly. It is partly her diet (she loves junk food) and definitely partly her lifestyle, as she has always loathed exercise of any kind, and her aversion to it only gets stronger as she gains weight because she has intense shame around her body and exercise makes you very aware of your body. But I don't think that's the whole picture, because I'm middle-aged now and I don't eat great and I'm still thin.

Increasingly, I think stress and trauma plays a much bigger role in obesity than we realize. My mom had an extremely traumatic childhood. Her relationship to her body has always been really troubled, even when she was thin, I think. She doesn't talk about it much and I don't think she is really willing to admit it to herself, but she was definitely physically and emotionally abused as a child. And watching her struggle with weight and seeing her issues with food, her body, shame, and self-hatred up close, it feels clear to me these things are linked. So I don't think you can just chalk it up to genetics alone. My mom is genetically predisposed to be thin, as all the women in our family are. But she isn't, and I don't think it's just due to lifestyle factors based on my own experience. There is something more to obesity and our fixation on diet really obscures what I think is actually going on.[/quote]

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