The Secrets of Thin People

 

Thin people favor bulky foods.

Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University, has done extensive research on “calorie density,” or the ratio of calories to the weight of food.
Simply put, foods with a high water content―fruits, vegetables, water-based soups and stews, and cooked whole grains―are low in calories but satiating. Most also contain lots of fiber (an apple has three grams; one cup of cooked barley has six), which fills you up.
Whether consciously or not, many thin people follow the strategy of starting out with a sizable soup or salad, which leads them to eat less for the rest of the meal. One Rolls-led study found that subjects who began a meal with a low-calorie salad―about 100 calories for three cups―were more likely to eat fewer total calories. “It subtracted about 12 percent of the calories from the meal,” she says. Foods with a lot of water, she adds, “can help you perceive that you’ve eaten more.” Drinking water with a meal, Rolls has found, doesn’t have the same effect.



Thin people don’t skip meals.

Slender people don’t drop everything to eat the minute their stomach starts to rumble, but they don’t let themselves get famished, either.
“In my work with over 15,000 patients, the number one behavior that leads people to lose control is skipping meals,” psychologist Stephen Gullo says. Why? Being ravenous makes you much less likely to control impulses to overeat.
Alice O’Neill, a trim 40-year-old playwright in Brooklyn, is quite familiar with this phenomenon. “Skipping meals can be deadly for me, because I do get really hungry and I don’t bear the pain of hunger well,” she says. “And if I’m hungry, I’ll eat anything, and too much of it. Sometimes I use hunger as an excuse to eat things that aren’t good for me, like pizza and French fries.”

Thin people don’t sit still.

At the Endocrine Research Unit of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, a study of 20 self-proclaimed couch potatoes―half of whom were lean, half mildly obese―revealed that the thin volunteers were more likely to stand, walk, and fidget. The researchers noted that the obese participants sat, on average, more than two hours longer every day than the lean ones did.
“If the obese subjects took on the activity levels of the lean volunteers, they could burn through about 350 calories more a day without working out,” says endocrinologist James Levine, the lead author of the study. “Over a year, this alone could result in a weight loss of approximately 30 pounds, if calorie intake remained the same.”
Simply moving around more, taking walks during the workday, and parking your car at the far end of the parking lot can burn many calories. But regular exercise is important, too. “Ninety percent of people who maintain their weight are exercising in a way that’s the equivalent of walking four miles a day,” says registered dietitian Elizabeth Somer, the author of 10 Habits That Mess Up a Woman’s Diet (McGraw-Hill, $17, amazon.com).
Johnson, for instance, does “some yoga stretching and light weights in the morning.” Then, she says, “I combine a run with walking my son to the bus. I’ll usually get some aerobic exercise every day.”
Regular workouts have another dividend: “Exercise makes you more aware of your body,” psychologist Stephen Gullo says. “You’re less likely to eat the chocolate cake that you know will take hours to burn off on the treadmill.”