It moves me to wonderment how a guy can eat like a pig and still be skinny as a rail, until a few decades have gone by. Then he eats like a bird and becomes as fat as a pig.
As you age your metabolism slows. Also there’s the matter of your own behavior, most athletes gain a bunch of weight right after retirement because they keep eating like they’re spending 6 hours a day at practice and in the weight room but they aren’t spending 6 hours a day at practice and in the weight room.
Because that first diet sets off a chain reaction that screws up your body and your ability to just eat normally forever. People who are naturally thin never give eating a second thought. They don’t obsess over it as we chunky folks do who have been trying to regulate our eating for many years.
(The following is from an article about a device called a Mandometer in the European Eating Disorders Review 12, 333-336 yr. 2004)
“In our framework, reduced food intake and enhanced physical activity are the principle risk factors for eating disorders, rather than an unspecified mental disorder. In support of this notion are data collected by Keys and collaborators, who decreased the food available to mentally and physically healthy men. These men developed most of the symptoms of eating disorder, including the psychiatric symptoms (Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen, & Taylor, 1950)
...the behavioral, physiological and psychological changes in eating disorders are the result of eating too little, rather than its cause. To treat the problem we retrain affected individuals to eat normally via continual feedback about their food intake during meals and as they learn to eat normally, the symptoms of their mental disorders disappear.”
Once again, it turns out that correlation is not the same as causation. For years, everyone thought that mental issues caused eating disorders. It turns out that restrictive eating causes mental problems. Well, duh! When you take something that ought to be natural and spontaneous (eating) and micro-manage it, it will make you nutty, just as trying to keep track of every breath you take and ration those would drive you bonkers.
Obsessing about weight is the first step on the road to ruin. The next one is restrictive eating (dieting or what we now call “healthy eating” - it’s still a blasted diet). Too bad it’s the #1 national pastime. I wonder how much we would weigh if we had never started down the diet path in the first place?
Dieting might even prove to be the spark that initiates the metabolic changes that eventually result in the development of type 2 diabetes. Wouldn’t that be a bummer?