What Determines Your Body Weight?

Posted by Health

Here are seven factors that influence how much you weigh on a purely physiological basis.

1. Genetics: Biology is destiny to a certain extent, but don’t forget that your parents’ lifestyle habits also influenced their weight. Their bodies aren’t necessarily exact blueprints for yours.

2. Food: What you eat and your calorie intake figure into your weight over time . It takes 3,500 calories to gain a pound, so when you gain weight from overeating, it’s generally overeating that has happened over many days, months, even years.

3. Medications: Some medications, including some antidepressants, contraceptives, antipsychotics, and drugs for bipolar disorder and insomnia may make it harder to lose weight because they alter your metabolism or increase your appetite or both.

4. Smoking: Nicotine actually allows your body to stay at a lower weight, as much as 12 to 20 pounds lower, by reducing your set point and dulling hunger. It also gives you something to do with your mouth besides stuff it with food. But smoking simply because you want to weigh less is a terrible idea. In fact, if you smoke, quitting smoking is the single most important health decision you can make.

5. Involuntary (basal) activity: Breathing, blinking, pumping your blood – all those involuntary activities you’re barely even aware of cost you calories. They help determine your basal metabolic rate.

6. Basic activity: You might think of this as nervous energy; it’s activities like pacing, jumping up to answer a phone instead of reaching for it, gesturing when you talk, even fidgeting in your chair during a meeting. In the course of a year, all these little moves add up to a big calorie burn-off. In fact, research has shown that thin people tend to do considerably more of this type of activity than heavier folks.

7. Extra activity: Anything you do beyond basic activity, whether it’s formal exercise, loke riding a bike thirty minutes, or just moving, like walking from your car into the grocery store, adds to the amount of calories you burn each day.