Remember the old nursery rhyme about how Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean?

While the historical roots of that rhyme are misty, it does suggest that people are metabolically different, something that apparently has been recognized for a long time.

So let's talk about it.

The dumbest weight loss advice I have ever heard was just find a thin person and eat what they're eating.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, there was a girl in my grade named Gail. Gail was skinny. Not just slim skinny. She got as much razzing for being so skinny as I did for being chubby. Lots of jokes about how if you could just melt us down and stir us together, we'd both come out the right size. Can you hear me rolling my eyes?

Gail just couldn't gain weight. It wasn't in her physiology so far as I could see. Just like any other kid, she wasn't turning down cookies or avoiding the ice cream truck. Her body just burned it off at a great rate.

In the 1980s, I had a boyfriend named Tom. Tom was six seven and weighed 150 pounds. For those of you in the civilized world, that's 200.7 centimeters and 68 kilos. Tom was very tall. Very thin. Yes, skinny. We were once out shopping for jeans for him when a strange woman took advantage of his being in the dressing room to come over and whisper. How can you be with someone like that? I'd hate him for being able to eat all the time.

Charming, but Tom could eat all the time. Indeed. He needed to eat all the time. I used to think he'd gotten a shrew gene patched in somehow, and had to eat his own body weight every 12 hours or starve.

This is not a character flaw

It is a fundamental difference in the way our bodies work. That doesn't mean we can't fight it, and we should, but it does mean that the societal judgment of us as weak-willed. It's oversimplified to the point of being just plain bigotry. Who knows how many more physiological differences we will discover?

But for now, the takeaway message is that this is not a character issue. We really are biochemically different than naturally slim people. 

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