So why the heck am I not fat?

Apparently, it's because I fidget!

I have just finished watching this documentary about why thin people don't get fat. Moral of the story? It's all genetic: just like your body programs you to be a certain height, so too it thinks you should be a certain 'natural' weight. This fascinates me because I have been the same height (183cm) and the same weight (65kg) since the age of 16, and nothing I have done in the last 18 years has really changed things much.

Admittedly, I usually tend towards the healthier diet and incorporate things like lots of walking into my lifestyle. Nonetheless, I go through periods (like the one I'm going through now) where I feel a bit down, and exercising falls by the wayside and all I do is eat high-calorie comfort foods.

And I can eat! Ask any of my friends and they will be able to tell you of the shocking amounts of food that I can put away. A memorable story is from a company summer party in Luxembourg where I put away several plates of rice and pasta salad as big as my head (my friends were horrified) and mere hours later came away saying I was really hungry, nay starving!

The interesting question the documentary posed is where the heck do all these calories go if you don't stock them up as fat cells. Apparently, there are three choices: some people give the energy off as heat (not me, I am constantly freezing); some people convert it to muscle mass (I wish! I am but skin and bone); and some people's body's protect their owners from weight gain by increasing the amount of 'involuntary body movement while at rest' a.k.a. fidgeting.

This has to be the explanation for me. Even asleep my body is constantly on the move. My family and I used to be fascinated by how as a teenager my (wheel-less) bed would end up a good foot away from the wall every morning when I woke up . Hello night terrors! Or night spasms! Or sleep jogging.! Or I don't know what... Moreover I have definitely suffered from the Saint Vitus's dance in the past, and as a child could be seen stepping out little Irish dancing routines even when seated. And then there was that one time in Thailand where certain strange substances may have been consumed that had me convinced that the only way I'd make it through the night was by doing bicycle crunches without pause until said substances had worked their way through my system. But the less said about that the better.

The point of all this being that you can throw away your Jane Fonda workout tapes and the like - the best way to battle the bulge is to have yourself at a constant state of high doe and the pounds will just drop away.

Actually, that's not what the documentary said at all. They were pretty fatalistic. After force-feeding all these thin people 10.000 calories a day for four weeks, even though they all ended up putting on on weight, they all returned to the original body shape and fat percentage about two weeks after the experiment ended without doing anything that different except returning to their normal lifestyle,

So basically love the body you're in because it's most likely the one you're stuck with!