My body REALLY wants to be a certain weight--anyone else????

Your body knows you best. It will respect your decision to train more on a slight calorie deficit. I save this decision till spring. I don't think it's healthy to lose weight in winter.

Story of my life.

College race fit: 147-152lbs

Now race fit: 172-177

Now after months of being idle: 195-205

i havent been idle in many years. I am race fit but cant get any lower without deteriorating my physical health.

That last sentence makes no sense.

Yep. I'm 5' 6.5" and I got down to 125-130 at one point and ran the best times of my life. Since then I've crept up to 138-140 and for the life of me, cannot budge from that. I feel better and look much better at this weight (BMI of 22). 125-130 was too thin, but damnit I ran like the wind at that weight.

i buy this to a limited extent. i used to be the skinny runner-soccer guy who looked out of place with my family. i now look roughly like my dad and brother, who played football.

i would complicate what you're saying slightly, and say back, as an adult i have experienced multiple equilibria. one weight inactive and eating bad. another eating bad but active. another eating well and active. i'm pretty sure it's burn rate meets blood sugar. if you have a fairly stable diet your blood sugar is probably fairly consistent. and your belly will reflect it.

i will say that, yeah, it's like sometimes when i do lose some i feel like bingeing and voila back to equilibrium. it is kind of like within a set of habits it wants to stay roughly put. but i think if you dramatically changed habits it would settle someplace else. i am 10 pounds down from where i was when i first got in the habits of just starting my desk job.

the most recent economics "nobel" (i know, it's technically not one) posits theories about what she calls greedy jobs that demand eagerly of your time and energy. that then dictates eating and other habits IMO. it took me a while to carve back out free time and make the space to be an athlete again. our version of society doesn't reward carving that time out and declaring that space mine. but that's how you get healthier. make your own lunch, do a healthier lunch, carve out consistent exercise/training time. kind of like most people do for families.

It is what it is, Chief

It’ll get worse through the years. 188 will become 192. Then 196. And so on.

I was a very thin runner guy into my thirties (150) but now at sixty have to eat carefully and exercise regularly to maintain 185. Based on my sedentary overweight brother, my body probably wants to be around 240.

FIFY

Look into “set point” theory. It may provide you with your answers.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Is there evidence for a set point that regulates human body weight?

There is evidence for the idea that there is biological (active) control of body weight at a given set point. Body weight is the product of genetic effects (DNA), epigenetic effects (heritable traits that do not involve chang...

Open link

No, you want to drink and eat like a hedonistic person. Just say that.

You could change it to:

GettingSlowerDude

or

KT@NCSt

if you are into archaeology, when they dig up someone's bones they can always estimate their muscle development from the thickness of the bones, and the size of the attachment points. They can reconstruct their size and weight just from that, pretty much.

Do bones change mass or weight very fast? Nope. Your body will fit your bones, however they are right now, more or less, if it can.

This is one reason why westerners, who grow up very well fed, are worse distance runners than east Africans or Japanese, who grow up eating sparingly. Skeletons relatively big, so even at their minimum weight they are still heavier.

That's funny. When I stopped running due to injury I LOST weight. I went from 140 lbs 5'10 each morning to about 137. My calfs lost all their size.

Elephants, giraffes, horses, rhinos, grizzlies, tigers are all much bigger on average than humans and can outrun humans. Sloths are much smaller and way slower. Snakes have very little bone mass and mostly muscle but are almost always slower than humans.

Any theory of being big boned is usually an excuse to cover up fat shame.

Pretty much the same boat. I was up to almost 200 at one point but got serious and was down to 160-165 which is what I was in my early 20's. But now at 42 it takes some serious effort to get under 170 and even more effort to stay there. Regardless of the fact I run about 40mpw average over the year with peaks up to 60-70 for races. I also bike some and weight train, body weight exercises etc..

I remember listening to some Dr or something (I don't exactly recall who or where exactly I heard) talking about weight and used the analogy that the body has like a "thermostat" for weight. If you lose a ton of weight the body won't adjust right away and stay at that weight, instead it will ramp up fat storage to bring you back to what it thinks is ideal. Same the other way, takes some actual work to gain past what it "thinks" is ideal. I don't know all the actual mechanisms, not sure if scientists even fully understand it but it seems to hold true. He basically said the only way to move the needle one way or the other is consistency, longer you can stay at the lower weight (or higher weight) that it will become your new ideal.

Probably why all those Biggest Loser people can never keep the weight off despite sticking to the regimen they learn on the show.

Ok, fatties. You can come up with these types of BS theories about “natural” body weight. If you run enough and don’t stuff your pie hole with snacks and trash food then you will reach your natural weight. If you are 6ft2 that is not 200 lbs.

father time has a hard lesson coming for you.

Some good input here bros, especially the guy with the link to the "set point" paper--that's exactly what I'm talking about. Fascinating stuff.

To the folks missing the point, telling me to stop stuffing my face--no duh! We all know we could be leaner and lighter by eating little and exercising lots. The interesting thing here is that my "hedonistic" behavior caused gainz up to 188, but then stopped. Bizarre.