Looking at my own body I tend to gain about 1kg per year. I’m 36 now, and gained 15kg since turning 21. I’m now about 95kg. Add another 50 years, and thus another 50kg, and they’ll need a forklift to carry my dead 145kg body to my grave. And I cycle 40km per day to/from work, eat moderately, and don’t drink or smoke.

As much as I’d like to believe that a slight increase in weight over the years could be/is beneficial and is natural, I doubt whether an increase of 1kg+ per year can be considered such. The use medicin and other medical procedures will add their own side effects, as will one’s personal lifestyle.

Finally, to fill my Savage Minds Comment Quota for the week (which has barely started), and to give some context to the Harvard Alumni Studies that Oneman has quoted from Ampersand’s post, I post below the results as published. Basically I think Oneman’s conclusions are untenable. Note that what they are saying is that it is weight gain and loss that is damaging. Note the weight gain ranges too – 1-5kg is ok (though worse than staying the same weight) but if you gain over 5kg you are a goner!

“Lowest mortality was among alumni maintaining stable weight (+/- 1 kg). With this category as referent (relative risk = 1.00), relative risks of death associated with losing more than 5 kg, losing between 1 and 5 kg, gaining between 1 and 5 kg, and gaining more than 5 kg, were 1.57, 1.26, 1.06, and 1.36 respectively. For coronary heart disease mortality, relative risks were 1.75, 1.43, 1.28, and 2.01, respectively. Findings were not explained by cigarette habit, physical activity, or body mass index. Those losing or gaining more weight also reported greater total lifetime weight loss, which may indicate weight cycling. CONCLUSIONS–Both body weight loss and weight gain are associated with significantly increased mortality from all causes and from coronary heart disease but not from cancer.”

I think it’s becoming fairly standard knowledge that the body shape we attain when we enter adulthood will pretty much remain throughout our lives. End your teen years skinny, chances are you’ll stay that way, and vice versa.

So perhaps it does make sense to worry about the diets of teens? If you’ve watched “Supersize Me” you’ll see what kind of crap most schools feed kids, and other studies have shown that large numbers of people think that French Fries are suitable for very young kids. I think these are things we should continue to be worried about… even as we de-emphasize adult weight loss programs.

Thus even though the absence of obesity may be favorable for young and healthy individuals, with the onsent of acute illness or old age, moderate obesity can become protective. These results are consistent with the notion that expanded fat stores facilitate survival when the individual is challenged by illness or aging.

Not a generic:

In fact, it appears that “healthy” people actually have a higher mortality rate than “unhealthy” fat people—that is, people with lower BMIs (body mass indexes) are more likely to die than even people who are significantly overweight!

…if your arteries are all clogged up it doesn’t matter how skinny you might be

That seems to be the point — exercise is good, balanced eating is good, but neither seems to have much to do with long-term weight-loss. On the other hand, diet plans intended to cause weight-loss seem pretty universally to raise mortality, as well as being almost never sustainable. I doubt Americans are doing themselves any favors eating diets high in fat and processed starches — but that seems to be because these foods are unhealthy, not because the weight that they sustain is.

I think it’s becoming fairly standard knowledge that the body shape we attain when we enter adulthood will pretty much remain throughout our lives. End your teen years skinny, chances are you’ll stay that way, and vice versa. As you note, this speaks to body weight as a developmental process, one that, as adults, we have little control over — as the Andean mountain dweller cannot make the choice to lose the barrel chest s/he attained in his/her adolescence.

I’d also like to throw in some pure speculation based on what I learned when I studied Physical Anthropology, which is that environmental factors can have a different effect upon us depending on our age. For instance, people who grow up at high altitutdes develop larger lungs and process oxygen better than thier brothers and sisters who move down below before hitting puberty. Moving back up to the mountains after you are already a teenager won’t make much difference. I’ve always assumed that dieting is very similar, in that if you are a fat teenager it will be very hard, if not impossible, to become a skinny adult. Although (the linked post makes clear) the changes in our body continue throughout our life – so perhaps puberty is not the only transition we should look at.