Losing 15 Pounds Last Year Was Easy — Keeping it Off Will Be the Challenge

All diets work at first but fail eventually. Is this the exception?

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

I remember vividly in middle school one day we were having a conversation about obesity during lunchtime. I was drinking a red Gatorade and someone mentioned that if I kept consuming junk like that, I would grow up to be fat. At the time, getting fat was the least of my worries. I was chronically skinny. Some guys wore a shirt to the pool to hide their belly, I wore one to hide my ribs. I desperately wanted to be a “normal” weight and the thought of becoming overweight or obese seemed even worse than staying scrawny given the connection between obesity and disease.*

It was during that lunchtime conversation that someone told me that the reason why people get heavier as the age is because their metabolism slows down. They said that some small percentage of the population are so blessed, that they can keep eating whatever they want forever and not get fat or sick. Keep in mind, this isn’t scientific, it’s something a middle-schooler said twenty years ago. But I desperately wanted it to be true and I desperately wanted it to be true for me.

I’m sad to report that whether or not some people are blessed enough to eat as much as they want of whatever they want…