Throughout my grown-up life, I've been at the receiving end of a lot of envy. "How on earth can you manage to eat so much and stay so slim?". Two articles from the NYTIMES of the last week have suddenly helped me come up with answers.

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

by James Vlahos suggests that my physical restlessness is part of the explanation. He describes experiments that closely monitor people's activity levels (using underwear with built-in sensors that register movement and posture) and food intake.  Some participants gained weight, while others didn't. The difference between the two groups wasn't some weird metabolic factor, but how much they moved. Both groups were forbidden to exercise, so that wasn't the decisive factor.  Instead, it was how much time they spent on their feet, moving around, or simply fidgeting.

On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.And when they sat, electrical activity in the muscles went down - the way the hum in a theater dies down when the curtains start moving apart. Calorie-burning rate immediately plunged to about one per minute, a third of what it would have been if they'd been up and walking. Insulin effectiveness dropped. The enzymes responsible for taking fats out of the bloodstream, plunged.

Is Sugar Toxic?by Gary Taubes strongly suggests that my (relative) lack of interest in sugar is another part of the explanation. The story has two suspects called "Sugar" (Sucrose) and HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). The crime they are suspected of, is nothing less than the tremendous increase over the last 50 years, of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

If the suspects are guilty, the article goes, it's probably because they share one property: When they're broken down in the intestine, 50-55% of them get turned into Fructose, which has to be digested by the liver. Unfortunately, the liver has a tendency to turn Fructose into fat if it's given too much. And "too much" might turn out to be a much smaller quantity than most people think.

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While I was writing this, another vision popped into my head. Those fat cells that we're complaining about, aren't alien invaders. They are parts of us, and they have only one way to defend themselves, when we try to slim them out of existence: They complain, and make us feel miserable. Wouldn't you have done the same, in their place?


:-J