The “I’m Naturally Fat” Myth

“It takes a lot of work for me to lose weight”

“I’m a big person. If I just live normally, I gain weight. I have to be super strict with my diet and exercise if I want to be thin.”

“As soon as I stop eating healthy and exercising, I balloon up”

“It’s my genetics, I’m naturally fat”

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard these excuses, and if you are an overweight person, be honest — how often have you said these things yourself?

But it’s not true. No one is naturally fat.

Your ancestors were all fit, strong, athletic apes. And you too have the genetics of a fit, strong, athletic ape. The problem is that you live so unnaturally now. You have actually had to work really hard to destroy your genetic potential. It has taken you a lifetime of eating a diet of sugary, processed foods, drinking soda, and being a couch potato to become fat and out of shape.

At the turn of the 20th century only 1 in 150 people were obese. Now 35% of Americans over the age of 20 are obese, and the number is skyrocketing. The problem is environmental, not genetic. The human genome has not undergone such dramatic change in only a few generations that nearly half of us now have the ‘obese gene’. In hunter-gatherer societies, not only is there no obesity, there is nobody who is overweight. Everyone is fit and in shape. That’s how humans are supposed to be. That’s how humans naturally are. That’s how you naturally are.

The good news is that your genetic potential to be fit and good looking is so strong, that just by returning to a natural diet and exercise lifestyle, you will lose weight fast and dramatically. Your body wants so badly to be healthy and fit, that it only takes months (or at most a couple of years for the hugely obese) to get back in top shape, despite all the bad habits you have picked up over your entire lifetime.

Stop thinking of eating a healthy diet and exercising as hard work. It’s not. It takes no more effort to pick up the healthy food item at the grocery store than it is to pick up processed trash. It doesn’t take any more effort to order the steak and veggies at the restaurant than it does to order the pizza. Exercise isn’t work, it’s fun. Your body wants to move. It will reward you with feel good hormones when you get your heart pumping. To sit on the couch all day is to fight against your genetics. Your body will make you lethargic and depressed as punishment for this laziness.

It is much easier to be fit and healthy than it is to be fat and out of shape. To be fit and healthy all you have to do is live naturally. To be fat and out of shape, you have to stuff yourself with processed junk and fight your body’s natural desires to get up and move. Stop trying so hard to be fat.