by Barbara Berkeley,
Do you feel like you can gain weight from eating air?
Overweight individuals often feel that they gain weight just by looking at food, yet our culture disbelieves this. " No", it says, "the reason you are overfat is because you are weak and have no willpower. Look at that thin person over there, now there is a role model."
This is utter nonsense as far as I'm concerned. While we debate about whether different people store food differently, owners of animals have long been aware of a phenomenon called "the Easy Keeper". Easy Keepers are animals that need very little food to exist, and who gain weight with extreme ease. They are easy to keep because they require so little feed. Let us always bear in mind that we human beings are part of the animal kingdom.
There are many examples of Easy Keepers on the farm I live on. In particular, our two donkeys Hershey and Lola (that's them on the right) eat practically nothing and grow an enormous belly if fed grain. Earlier this month I published a video on Facebook about our horses becoming fat as well. You can view it below. What I neglected to mention in this video is that that each of these horses weighs over a thousand pounds. The amount of grain that made them fat was the equivalent of an astoundingly small two cups of feed at breakfast and dinner.
I believe that people can be Easy Keepers too. In fact, this is exactly the phenomenon that most overweight people experience when they have trouble understanding why weight comes on them so easily.
The problem of being Easy Keeper-ish appears to accelerate after the menopause, a time when previously normal weight women find themselves suddenly gaining fat. But it may, in fact, correlate with age in general. Women like to point to the menopause as a seminal event in their metabolic struggles, but just look at the mid-sections of the majority of men in their fifties and beyond. It is also possible to be an Easy Keeper throughout one's life. This is the innate truth that most overweight people intuit about themselves, yet are prevented from believing by those who've never personally experienced this phenomenon and therefore dismiss it.
If you were to ask me why people, like animals, can be Easy Keepers, I would speculate that it is because they are elegantly designed to live on the minimum. Being an Easy Keeper conveys a survival advantage. As we've discussed many times before in these pages, humans appear to need only smallish quantities of high quality food to thrive. This would make sense if we look back to most of human existence when obtaining food was difficult. So problem number one is that we have completely lost track of what normal human eating should look like. During the course of my lifetime, I've seen "normal" eating go from three meals a day without snacking or eating in restaurants to snacking and food consumption during every waking hour. According to the United States Healthy Food Council, the average American eats out 5.8 times per week, and this figure does not take into account the pre-prepared food we buy, which are essentially restaurant meals (food prepared by others with ingredients we would probably not use if cooking for ourselves).
What makes Easy Keepers go from healthy weight to overweight? As you can probably guess, I would speculate that it is carbohydrate consumption. Our bodily system for processing carbohydrates appears to be fragile and easily broken. Most likely that is the effect of being engineered for a diet that was not very carb heavy for most of human history.
While I believe this to be the issue in humans, imagine my surprise when I came across this explanation of the phenomenon in horses. It turns out that vets now believe that horses, like humans, develop fat via a disordered carbohydrate metabolism. This, of course, is the reason that our overfat farm horses needed to stop eating grain. This sets up problem number two, the fact that we have lost any realistic understanding of the amount of carbohydrates we can tolerate. Problem number three is that, even if we accept fewer carbs here and there, we don't want to admit the degree to which we are becoming increasingly intolerant to carbs whether because of aging, changes in our environment, or alterations in our micro biome.
What remains very important is the observation noted above that seemingly insignificant amounts of the wrong foods (a few of fistfuls of grain in a thousand pound horse) can have such a large effect. Problem four is that we persist in believing mostly in the calorie theory, and less in the idea that even small portions of the foods we can't metabolize correctly will cause weight gain.
If you are an Easy Keeper, I give you permission to believe that you can pretty much live on air. I validate your feeling that even a few bites of the wrong thing makes your scale go up. What I will not confirm is the belief that to be thinner you have to somehow "live like a thin person". A naturally thin person (and these are becoming vanishingly rare) can eat and not gain weight, so trying to be like him or her is an exercise in futility.
Embrace yourself as an Easy Keeper and work hard at finding the formula that allows you to stay at healthy weight. I continue to believe that you will find the answer in smallish amounts of more original foods and in amounts of carbohydrates that are lower than what you currently think tolerable. Each one of us has a different tolerance and balance. Finding yours is your mission if you want to avoid the cycle of dieting and regain.