Lean and Hard

Either you've said it or heard it: "When I was younger I ate everything in sight and was thin as a rail. Now I eat a single donut and put on five pounds!"

I can tell you for certain that I gave not a moment's thought to my eating when I was 16, and I was a skinny guy.

I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. And look at me! But then a few decades passed and I weighed more than 300 pounds. What the hell happened?

This is what I think:

It's not that something mysterious changed and my metabolism suddenly slowed to a crawl. It's that I was always eating more than I was burning, but since I was still growing and developing, the extra calories went into producing that growth. I was getting heavier, but it wasn't fat. It was muscle, bone, blood, etc. Add to this the fact that I was very active: I was always on the move and playing sports in school.

But as I got older, I became less active and my body, no longer needing to build, started storing fat. I kept eating what I wanted, but burned and used less. So I put on a few pounds of fat every year. Maybe noticeable, but not alarming, really. With those extra pounds came increased difficulty in moving around, so I became even less active.


From 175 to 180. Then 180 to 185. No big deal. Then I hit 190 and decided to diet. I dieted and lost 20 pounds. Yay! But then I went back to the usual over-eating and under-exercising and started the process over again. This happened maybe 3 or 4 times until I gave up.

Finally, after all these years, I've found a way to limit my caloric intake and eat a nutrient dense diet as a way of life, and have also developed the habit of exercise. The cycle has been broken and I'm not looking back. Except for writing about it. :-)

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