From your article link, Ark:
Kolata concluded that it’s not a lack of a willpower that keeps us above our idealized target weight. ”Scientists know that animals and people have a range of weights that they can comfortably sustain. Each person’s range is different but any weight much above or below a person’s range is almost impossible to maintain.” There is no perfect diet, she insists. “In the end,” she adds, “no matter what the diet and no matter how hard they try, most people will not be able to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. They can lose a lot of weight and keep it off briefly, they can lose some weight and keep it off for a longer time, they can learn to control their eating, and they can learn the joy of regular exercise…The effort, the lifelong effort, can be rewarding. But true thinness is likely to elude them.”
So if you’re going to fixate on something, you’ll get better results with concentrating on eating the right kind of foods and getting regular exercise and letting your genes do their thing. Try not to get discouraged by this news, but rather know that you’re just as nature intended you.
"idealized target weight". Everyone has their ideal. Compare that with a baseline metabolic rate and and an active metabolic rate for amount of calories one should consume based on age and activity level to get some ideas of numbers. The numbers help find that range.
Take out junk food. Add fruits and veggies. Limit sugars and crap carbs. Consume adequate protein. Eliminate soda and limit juice consumption. Follow the guidelines of what we should be seeing on our plates at mealtimes. For virtually every obese young child, I guarantee you nobody is doing this for them, and the parents aren't modeling it either. Far from it.
It's not about being thin. It's about not being obese and having a decent BMI. I can cite numerous examples of real people who supposedly come from a family of "heavy" genes. Example 1: A lunch monitor at our school (and her husband) are large people on the heavy side. As long as I've known their daughters, they've been heavy and overweight. The entire family is overweight. Is it in their genes? To be a larger size, yes. heavy no. How do I know this? The younger daughter got tired of being heavy and she started eating healthy. Today she is a normal size for a girl of her height, frame, and age. The mother has also shed major poundage. The mother is still large sized, but she is not obese like she used to be. Could the mother shed more? Probably, but she has likely added years to her life just based on what she has lost and has kept off thus far. Her daughter is to be commended for tackling this problem head on in a healthy way and getting her weight under control now. It will always be work for her.
One of my friends that I've known for 15 years (same age as me). She's a nurse who works full time but joined my gym about 6 years ago. She's always been heavy, but works out all the time. She's not heavy anymore. She totally revamped her eating program and lost 70 lbs. She looks terrific. It will always be work for her to keep it off. Her focus was blood sugar and HBP levels. Sounds like me lol. The goal was to get healthy.
There is a point to this not to be missed:
Frustrated by the fact that no matter how much time you log on the treadmill your body wants to stay the same size? Turns out your genes may be the reason. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that no amount of dieting will alter the number of fat-hoarding cells in our bodies. According to their findings published in the science journal Nature, it seems that the number of fat cells is predetermined during adolescence and stays the same later in life. How and where you store fat can’t be changed, and is one of the reasons why dieting doesn’t often work for many people.
Everyone has an optimal weight. Our bodies do want to remain at that optimal weight. Yes, genes are the reason for that. If everyone ate following proper dietary principles, they'd find out what they're weight should be. If the number of fat cells is predetermined during adolescence, isn't it imperative that we tackle the issue of childhood obesity as early as possible?
How and where one stores fat can't be changed. I agree. It's why we talk about apple shapes and pear shapes. Dieting doesn't work. Agree again. Healthy eating and portion sizes DO work. The problem is, most parents and a lot of kids simply don't know what healthy eating is. They think they're eating healthy, and they're not. They're consuming far more calories than they ever should in a day.
I don't want the point of this article to be missed. Genes play into the equation. But they are not nearly as much as you think. Genes will determine things like frame size, where are fat deposits will be, etc. I reiterate though, most of us are not born to be obese. We do that to ourselves. If we blame our size on genetics, we our doing ourselves a dis-service.
I always thought I did have heavy genes in my family tree. My maternal grandmother was a heavy woman. I grew up seeing her that way. When I was 16, she collapsed in her kitchen and was rushed to the hospital. She hadn't seen a doctor in 20 years, but at age 69 she was diagnosed as a diabetic with HBP and glaucoma. The RD developed a nutritionally sound meal program for her along with her diabetes meds. We visited her a year later and my jaw dropped. My grandmother was not a heavy woman at all. Give her sound meal plan which my stubborn, German grandmother followed, and her "ideal" weight was a result of that plan. It was at age 17 I realized there were no "fat" genes in my family. My grandmother was formerly heavy because she was eating far too much of everything, including junk food.
Some kids will be bigger than others due to genetics. Their frames sizes may be bigger. But most of those obese kids in school can be helped. Obesity is not in our genes. Not in most of us anyway. I love Michelle Obama's platform. She's trying to bring attention to this. Until parents get on the bandwagon though, I don't see any real change. Heavy kids need to be helped like starving kids. It's that serious a health issue. Maybe not immediate like starving children, but it will be later in their lives. It's a terrible situation. I hate seeing kids being made fun of due to their weight too. But that's a different social issue.