FATNESS
It is true that some people can eat all they wish and, to the annoyance of their weight-conscious, dieting friends, remain thin. The reason is thought to be that they are more efficient in the way they handle the extra energy and are able to disperse it into their surroundings, in the form of heat. Also, these people are often more active.
It seems, too, that the tendency to fatness may start very early in life. Investigators have found that if a baby is obese it has an 80 percent chance of becoming a fat adult. If a mother, through misguided kindness, overfeeds her baby, by giving it extra semi-solid cereal baby foods too early in life, she maybe laying the foundations for obesity later in life. In the first year of life, babies form fat cells to help store the extra energy the body receives from overfeeding. These fat cells differ from fat cells formed after the age of I which are designed to meet a need and once that need has gone disappear. In contrast, the fat cells formed before the age of I persist. If a fat adult, who was a fat baby, tries to lose weight, the cells simply become emptier and smaller, and in some strange way, these ‘hungry’ cells send out messages which stimulate the person’s appetite, so that dieting becomes difficult.
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