Genes, Diet, & Weight Loss
It has been discovered that weight gain is not only the result of the poor diet but the result of bad genes as well. Eating in an improper manner, consuming large amounts of calories and consuming the wrong foods will expand your waistline without a doubt. However if two people would consume the exact same things and do the exact exercises over a certain period of time, it is most likely that one of them will have put on way more fat and weight than the other.
I am not trying to say that the diet is not important, because it is. In the United States of America for example, the reason why the obesity rate grew up so fast is because the people made the wrong choices when it came to what they eat. They had and still have a wrong living style and that can get to them. The genes can influence ones capacity of storing fat, but fortunately there is a solution for that problem. It has been discovered that a low carbohydrate diet can influence the capacity of the genes of storing fat.
However the same diet for a different person might not be useful at all. It seems that each person responds in a different manner to different things. Laura Reed, an evolutionary geneticist at North Carolina State University stated that the process of losing weight and eliminating fat is very complicated. She also stated that in most of the cases the people are looking for the quick fix, but that does not exist. Losing weight and fat is a lifetime process and many people seem to not realize this. Many people fall in the trap of following a certain diet, just because a certain celebrity stated that is using it.
What they do not know is that the celebrities such as actors often have to change their body compositions for certain movie roles. However, people seem to be attracted to these things, because it is always much easier to try to obtain something in the easiest manner without breaking a sweat. Each person responds to what they eat in a different manner, and this is why the diet which a certain celebrity followed might not work for a different person.
The low-fat, low-carbohydrate, Mediterranean-style diets, and many other similar diets which restrict the consumption of certain foods might be good, but not for everyone. For example certain people who followed the low-carbohydrate diet stated that they feel very energetic, whereas other people who followed it stated that they felt the opposite. This is why it is important to know your body and to know the way in which it reacts to certain things.
Reed attempted fruit flies on various diets. The flies were split into four groups, each of the group consuming a different food. One consumed normal lab food, other one a calorie-restricted regime, other one a high-sugar diet and one fattened up with coconut oil. She measured the weight of the flies and the concentration of sugar in the hemolymph, which is the blood of the flies. They realized that in the case of the flies the diet alone was not very important. Only 2 percent of the flies changed as a result of the diet. It seemed that the genes were just as important when it came to losing weight, if not more important.
The humans just like the fruit flies contain variations in DNA sequence for traits. These variations are hidden under stable conditions. When the conditions are changed, such as the introduction of a certain diet, then the variations start to reveal themselves. The hidden genetic variations are revealed and those are the ones which provide the response why a person reacts in a different manner to certain diets than the other one.
The high-fat diet in the case of the fruit flies proved to be a good example of this. Some of them got fat whereas others did not even though they consumed the exact same foods. Some of the flies were heavily affected by the diet, their survival rates dropping dramatically. On the other hand there were flies which were not affected by the diet, and their survival rates did not go down.
They were able to predict the influence which the genes have when it comes to putting on weight, and they observed that in the case of the high-fat diet the genes were very influential. We as humans are very similar to the fruit flies from this point of view, especially since we usually consume lots of fat and lots of sugar. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that the obesity rate started to increase with the beginning of the 1980s. The percentage of the people who are underweight has decreased since then from 2.4 percent to 1.8 percent.
However besides the genes and the diet there are other things which can be very influential when it comes to losing and gaining weight. The age, the sex, and the physical activity are very important. A younger person will have higher chances of losing weight than an older one, because the metabolism of the younger person is faster than the one of the older person. The physical activity is very important as well because it is much easier to lose weight through diet and exercises than through diet alone. In most of the cases dieting alone will result in muscle loss. This is why many people have the skinny-fat look, meaning that they have very low muscle mass and they have a high percentage of body fat. The more muscle one has the less obvious the fat will be and the faster the metabolism will get as well.
The diet is the most important thing we need to control when trying to lose weight. It is very important to make the changes for life, otherwise we will not be able to lose the weight and keep it off for good.
