An Inconvenient Truth the Weight Loss Industry Rarely Talks About

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-tank-top-working-out-7801495/

This article may come as bad news to some of you, but hopefully it will lead to greater self-acceptance and happiness in the long run.

The weight loss industry has long ignored (tried to hide?) a simple fact of life that renders many of their promises unachievable.

That fact of life is that we each have a basic body type and it is mostly a matter of genetics – it’s not something you can expect to change drastically with diet or exercise. Now, that’s not to say that diet and exercise are worthless. You can very much improve your fitness, metabolic health, and longevity with healthy eating and regular physical activity. But you may or may not be able to change the way your body looks all that much, depending on what body type you have and what you might be trying to achieve with your diet and exercise efforts.

This brings me to the three basic body types (recognizing that there are not clear boundary lines and one can certainly have traits from more than one body type):

The purely ectomorphic type is naturally thin, with a small frame and relatively small musculature. Think someone like Woody Allen.

The endomorphic type is the generally heavier, thicker body type with a lot of mass, but usually not a lot of muscular definition. An example would be someone like rapper Lizzo.

Finally, the mesomorphic body type is the naturally muscular type with an advantage in developing both muscle mass and definition. Dwayne Johnson is a classic mesomorph.

Of course, there’s a range in all of these types, but they’re mainly separated by natural tendencies. If you’re thin and have difficulty gaining weight, you’re most likely an ectomorph. If you tend to stay heavy/thick no matter how strictly you diet and how hard you work out – you’re probably an endomorph. And if you’re one of those folks who builds muscle easily – that suggests you’re a mesomorph.

Through diet and exercise, regardless of your body type, you can somewhat improve things like body fat percentage and muscle size, strength, and endurance, but the natural body type still remains and things will shift back to your genetic tendencies pretty quickly if you become inconsistent with your fitness and eating regimen.

On the other hand, poor lifestyle choices can negatively impact your genetic predispositions. An overall skinny ectomorph or muscular mesomorph can certainly gain weight and deposit excess fat. Typically, these types gain weight localized in the abdominal area, whereas endomorphs usually gain weight all over.

In any event though, there are generally limitations on how much change in body type and shape can be achieved, for better or worse. And assuming you’re making positive changes, you’ll probably have to be pretty consistent with your diet and exercise program to make progress, or even just maintain where you are if you’re an ectomorph or endomorph. Mesomorphs still have to put in some effort, but they tend to gain and maintain their muscle development a bit more easily - other than those like the aforementioned Dwayne Johnson who do intense training to achieve unusually high levels of muscle size and definition.

Being a mesomorphic type does have one distinct disadvantage in terms of health and longevity. Mesomorphs who lapse into less than ideal habits often gain excess visceral fat (fat around the abdominal organs) and gain weight without it being very noticeable at first. Visceral fat is associated with several chronic health conditions, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So, health issues can “sneak up” on them a bit easier than with ectomorphs (for whom abdominal weight gain is more apparent) and endomorphs who not only tend to store fat more evenly throughout the body, but also tend to be monitored more closely by their health care providers.

But again, each type has natural tendencies and lifestyle makes a big difference in how those tendencies are expressed in an individual’s body.

To use myself as an example, I naturally fall into the ectomorphic body type. But I work out pretty hard, and some might mistake me for a mesomorph (albeit on the thinner end of the scale for that body type). But if I stop working out for a week or more for some reason, or if I get sick and stop eating my usual amount for a short period, I lose weight (much of it muscle) pretty quickly. But even with a pretty intense weightlifting regimen for several years when I was younger, I quickly maxed out on how muscular I got (even though I continued to increase in strength). Much to my disappointment, I finally realized in my late 20’s that I was never going to look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve had patients who are natural endomorphs who have had gastric bypass surgery. While they do lose a lot of weight after the surgery, these people never really look thin. The weight loss can be very obvious and they may look quite thin, even emaciated, for them, but not really in comparison to someone on the ectomorphic or even mesomorphic side.

Regardless of which body type you have, you can very much have a good, healthy life if you choose to take good care of yourself and can accept and embrace the body you’ve got. On the other hand, neglect will eventually have negative effects on the health of anyone.

The problem really comes down to the idea that everyone has to have the ideal mesomorphic body – lean and muscular. And if someone doesn’t have that, they’re often considered to be undisciplined, unattracive, and/or unhealthy. Given that only about 17% of the population falls into the true mesomorphic body type, and over 50% squarely in the endomorphic category, this is a recipe for a whole lot of people to be dissatisfied with their bodies – and to be eager consumers for the latest and greatest diet or exercise program that comes along - that probably isn’t sustainable long-term for most people.

Ultimately, many of these programs end in failure and disappointment, and worse, set people up for the “yo-yo” effect of losing some weight before giving up on a given program and then gaining it back and then some before excitedly starting on the next one.

For this reason, I am not a fan of any particular diet or exercise program. I think it’s far better to find a way to eat reasonably well without being overly restrictive and to do some form of physical activity / exercise that you enjoy (or at least don’t hate) and just make it a long-term routine. My advice is to learn to accept your body and do things to stay healthy, and not for the sole purpose of losing weight. I know that’s easier said than done, but in the long-run, I think it makes for a better life.

Until next time…

George Best, D.C.