Getting Your Genes Into Your Jeans

Any number of people have remarked that one of the smartest things you can do to be healthy is to, “choose your parents wisely.”  That’s doubly important when it comes to your weight.  I feel very fortunate that I had normal-to-thin parents with no life-threatening inherited diseases (a few quirks here and there, but no cancer or diabetes, so I really mustn’t grumble).  I know plenty of people who aren’t so lucky.

Taking After Dad

I have a friend who is one of four children born to a willowy, sylph-like mother and a stocky, heavily-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 exclusively from Mom’s side of the family; the other girl, sadly, got Dad’s.  She spent her formative years eating pretty much what her siblings ate, and maintaining roughly the same activity level as they did, yet her siblings were all model-thin and she was shopping at Lane Bryant.  At best, that’s got to be terribly depressing; at worst, it can drive you to dangerous starvation diets just to try to achieve your family’s “normal.”

In absolute scientific terms, you get exactly 50% of your genes from each parent.  That’s rarely how they are expressed, though.  Why?  No idea, and I started my college life as a Genetics major.  If you can 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 switched from engineering.  Nobody with a soul dreams of a future as an accountant, 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 image 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.

The Size You Were Meant to Be

There are plenty of other factors that govern weight besides heredity, chief among them environment and lifestyle.  I often 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 daily basis, because even though the parents are clearly not allowing their children the same overindulgences the parents enjoy, that behavior 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 destiny 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 probably 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 trying to fit into your old cheerleader outfit.