currently I’m on a weight loss journey meanwhile most of my highschool class are as skinny as they were senior year (some have blown up like balloons as well) I’m 26 now and I’ve seen classmates and they’re identical to when they were 17-18 years old. Is being “naturally skinny” actually a thing? As in do some people just naturally only consume 1,500 calories per day unconsciously? I know they aren’t working out
Very broadly, yes.
Different people have different natural metabolisms, different builds, propensity toward muscularity, bodies that store fat in different areas and at different rates.
Of course, diet and physical activity play into this heavily as well, as does age.
A lot of people will be naturally skinny and more active when they are young, then you add a decade of sedentary office work… and they’ve never needed to learn how to eat well and exercise enough… and they get larger.
Other people can start off larger, learn a whole lot about healthy diet and exercise, and go in the opposite direction and become much more fit in that same decade.
I’m about 30 and still skinny. I eat at least 2,000 kcal a day, up to 3,000 kcal. I only get more weight by working out. Recently I’ve been injured and couldn’t work out for several months. I dropped back to about 70 kg (I’m almost 1,90 m) - while eating the same amount of calories.
Maybe I need to space out my calories, I only eat two meals and don’t snack at all. These just happen to be really big meals.
For the record, I’ve been checked for thyroid issues and other stuff. My body just really wants to stay at 70 kg, I guess.
As someone that was a tall skinny guy until I was 40; it’ll come for you, then you’ll have to work at it. Now I bump off the top of normal BMI unless I pay serious attention to avoiding carbs. And I’m pretty active compared to most people, more active than when I was in my 30s.
IDK what happens, but it’s like all those calories I used to take in from 2lbs of pasta would just disappear into thin air, now they hang around and weigh me down.
10 years ago people told me the same thing about getting 30, yet it still hasn’t happened. Whether that day may come or not, I can just appreciate that I still get “Once you’re old…” kinda stuff after 30. Feels good, actually.
Yep. I generally eat when I’m hungry and have always been underweight. I’m 5’11" and was 130 around age 20. I’m 150 now so still lanky but not skeletal. I think the fact that I’m accustomed to smaller meals helps. I find it genuinely difficult to eat more than 700 calories in one sitting unless it’s something calorie dense like fast food.
Yes. TDEE is going to vary from person to person. Some people will just naturally burn more energy doing nothing, while other people will burn less. There’s not a single known reason; I recall seeing something very interesting that linked it to gut flora, but I don’t know whatever came of that.
If you really want to burn calories, you need to make your body as inefficient as possible. That means packing on muscle; build a weight routine with the goal of adding as much strength and mass as possible. That means high weights, low reps, medium number of sets, and hit each major body part about weekly. Before I fucked my shoulder, that was chest, back, legs, rest, shoulders/arms, rest, rest, with cardio 6 days/week, and abs 6 days/week. (Abdominals and erector spinae should be endurance rather than raw mass/strength.) Keep your cardio all LISS; don’t exceed zone 3 at all, and work towards about an hour a day of cardio. Oh, and you gotta track your intake. Too often people will get the exercise ‘right’, but utterly fail to deal with what they eat. While you can outrun a bad diet, it’s really, really hard, and the older you get, the harder it is.
Before I’ve wrecked my shoulder–currently trying to get surgery to repair a high-grade tear in a rotator cuff tendon–I was largely avoiding running. Now that I can only do cardio, I’m trying to do a lot of zone 3 training, and at least one day each week where I’m running (zone 4/5) for an hour. I’m to the point where a 5k would not be too difficult, even though I wouldn’t have a competitive time. If you’re going to do cardio, IMO an eliptical is the easiest way to get into zone training, and stay in the desired zone.
