Lane Bryant Pretty
|
Any number of persons have remarked that one of the smartest things you may do to be healthful is to “choose your parents wisely.” That’s doubly necessary when it comes to your weight. I feel very fortunate that I had normal-to-thin parents with no life-threatening inherited impairment of normal physiological functions (a few quirks here and there, but no cancer or diabetes, so I genuinely mustn’t grumble). I recognise a great deal of people who aren’t so lucky. I have a friend who is one of four children born to a willowy, sylph-like mother and a stocky, to a considerable degree built father. You’ve seen this couple a zillion times- it’s the classic “head cheerleader marries football team captain” story. Three of the kids, both boys and one of the girls, seem to have received their genetic material completely from Mom’s side of the family; the other girl, sadly, got Dad’s. She expended her formative years eating gorgeous much what her siblings ate, and sustaining roughly the same action level as they did, yet her siblings were all model-thin and she was buying goods at Lane Bryant. At best, that’s got to be terribly depressing; at worst, it may drive you to dangerous starvation diets just to try to achieve your family’s “normal.” In sheer scientific terms, you get precisely 50% of your genes from each parent. That’s seldom how they are expressed, though. Why? No idea, and I started my college life as a Genetics major. If you may figure it out, they’ll probably give you a Nobel Prize. (I didn’t grow up planning to be an accountant. The day I started at my firm, nine of us started together; seven of us were former science majors and the other two swopped from engineering. Nobody with a soul dreams of a future in accountancy, and I get to say that, because I AM one.) The older I get, the more I look like my mother. My brother is the spitting effigy of my mother’s father. My sister looks like my father’s sister. You pull the lever on the genetic slot machine and hope that it comes up sevens and not lemons. There are a great deal of other components that govern weight besides heredity, chief amid them surroundings and lifestyle. I ofttimes see two very overweight parents walking with their normal-weight young children, and I want to take the kids and give them to somebody who does not eat double pepperoni with a 72 oz. Coke on a every day basis, because even even though the parents are without doubt or question not permitting their children the same over-indulgences the parents enjoy, that conduct is what the kids are learning. Those kids are going to chow down as soon as they get the chance, because that’s what they’ve seen their role models do. And they just might one day say to themselves, “Well, I guess my fat is in my genes- I mean, both my parents are fat.” And it won’t be true. They inherited a normal-weight fate that was corrupted by Donut Depot and House of Hamburgers. Ask your parents for pictures from when they were children and teens. If one or both of them has always been stocky, you may have inherited a predisposition for bulk. This doesn’t mean that you can’t still be svelte, but it does mean that you’re going to have to work harder at it than the rest of us with thin parents. You’ll in all likelihood need to see a nutritionist, but if it’s what you want, you can do it. And to all you cheerleaders out there, please marry the quarterback or the running back; they tend to be long and lean. Leave the middle linebackers and offensive tackles for the larger girls. Otherwise, sure as the sunrise, you’ll end up with a daughter who will starve herself into neurosis and malnutrition attempting to fit into your old cheerleader outfit. |
