Here is a question that I have addressed many times.

Why can some people eat what they want and still not gain an ounce, but I only think about certain foods and gain weight? I have a close friend who eats whatever he wants and always looks fit and fit and it drives me crazy.

That’s an excellent question and it requires a lot on my part to answer it, so here it goes. First of all, join the club as I am in the category of gaining weight/body fat just thinking about crunchy cream donuts. I also have a friend around 37 who has always eaten what he wants and still looks fit and lean.

This problem raises questions about what looks good and is actually healthy, genetics, etc. I will first address genetics because I am not an expert in the science of genetics. But plain and simple, some people gain or lose weight more easily than others. It’s no different than how some people can run 100 meters in under 11 seconds, dunk a basketball, or hit a baseball 500 feet. Some people have it and some don’t. So with that in mind, are you doomed to fail? Absolutely not! Like I said before, I’m in your category of gaining body fat just from thinking about junk food, but that hasn’t stopped me from achieving my goals and the many people I’ve worked with. The key is to not make excuses and find what works best for you. If your friend can eat whatever he wants, then good for him, but you have to live by different rules. Yes, you will have to work a little more, but that’s life. You may also find (as I do) that as you get older, people who had it easy (eat what they wanted and not exercise) find it much harder as they get older.
What makes it even more difficult for them are the bad habits they developed from not having to do things right their entire lives. Here are some examples of this:

I trained a 38 year old woman who never exercised and ate what she wanted until she was 34 or 35. She looked amazing and always had an amazing figure. Her life changed drastically when she was hit by a car. Due to injuries and depression after the accident, she gained a lot of weight and now she was in a position where she couldn’t do what she wanted. In working with her, I found that her biggest hurdle was simply changing her habits from eating what she wanted and not exercising to being disciplined with diet and exercise. She would tell me about the days when she could wear a two-piece suit without caring about what she ate and whether or not she exercised. She told me that her favorite exercise was walking to get her favorite chocolate. It wasn’t until she became disciplined that she began to progress, but it was very difficult since being thin and slender was always easy for her.

Another example is my friend, who has always eaten what he wanted and never exercised, but still managed to be an amazing athlete and always looked lean and lean. Although he’s still trimming, he’s starting to develop a bit of a paunch and his health and conditioning aren’t what they used to be. Because he’s so talented, I like to challenge him to 400-meter races from time to time as a kind of measuring stick for me. The last race we had he won again, but then he curled up on the ground and felt like throwing up. And although he looks healthy, his conditioning is terrible and his cholesterol and triglycerides are very high. I always talk to him about what an incredible specimen he would be if he ate a healthy diet and exercised. I can almost guarantee that he wouldn’t have high cholesterol and triglycerides and he certainly wouldn’t have that belly.

My latest example is from a friend I grew up with who played professional baseball for the Twins, Mariners, and Reds. He loved to exercise growing up, but he maintained a terrible diet even when he became a professional baseball player. One day I get a call from him wanting to hire me as a personal trainer. When I met him, he had put on over 30 pounds, and it wasn’t all muscle. He explained that he couldn’t lose weight because he didn’t know where to start and he was used to eating fast food his whole life. Fortunately we put him in contact with a good nutritionist and he was able to lose those unwanted pounds. However, the hardest part was breaking those old habits.

So the moral of this story is that just because it looks good doesn’t mean it is. There is a long list of people who look good but are not healthy. Just take a look at many professional bodybuilders. Yes, they have all those bulging muscles and low levels of body fat, but if you look at some of their lab results, there’s cancer, heart attacks, liver disease, and so much more waiting to happen from all the steroid abuse.

The sad thing is that we live in a society where appearance is often the only important thing.
World famous personal training expert Juan Carlos Santana of IHPFIT.com said it best: “95% of the people I work with just want to look good in that red dress or that bathing suit. They’d even feel like crap.” if that meant it looked good.” Sad but true man… Sad but true.

I challenge you to love for more man. Aim for health because the best wealth is health. So let his friend follow his own path and continue on the path of health and wellness which, by the way, will also help you look good.