Why Your Friend Is Always Skinny BUT You’re NOT!
Let’s be honest folks, we all have that friend who is always annoyingly skinny!
They eat like a bottomless pit but never seem to put on any weight while all we need to do is look at a candy bar and the pounds start piling on!
What’s going on??
Well, it’s to do with something often referred to as an individual’s genetic set point!
Genetic Set What??
Now while food is our fuel, what happens when food isn’t available?
I don’t mean when the burger joint is closed, I mean back in ancient cave-person times when there’s an ice age and you’re literally stuck in a starvation scenario?
Well thankfully we have backup energy reserves, like an extra battery pack and that’s our fat cells!
Our bodies have evolved over the years to help the human species survive and back in those ancient times, when food might have been scarce and you’re faced with hunger and famine, it’s the person that naturally has more fat that would survive while your always skinny friend would likely die!
Fast forward to the modern day developed world, food is much more readily available and this survival mechanism is kinda redundant!
We don’t need these emergency energy stores and not only that, in our very visual / aesthetic world, the very mechanism that would have stopped you from dying is making you look how you don’t want to!
We’re all born with a different number of fat cells, some have more and some have less, meaning we all have a slightly different sized back up battery pack that our body wants to keep full - just in case aliens attack and we’re stuck in a famine again!
Your always skinny friend has fewer fat cells, a lower body fat percentage that they’re programmed to keep full while those of us that struggle to lose fat, have more fat cells and a higher body fat percentage that our body is trying to keep us at.
This level of body fat percentage that your body is trying to keep you at is your genetic set point.
If you lose fat and your body fat levels start to drop below this set point, your hunger hormones are going to start attacking you, making you hungry and want to