{"id":734,"date":"2018-05-08T22:45:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T04:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/?p=734"},"modified":"2021-08-13T21:39:01","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T03:39:01","slug":"how-to-be-a-skinny-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2018\/05\/08\/how-to-be-a-skinny-person\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Be a Skinny Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to various formulas developed between 53 and 35 years ago, I’m right in my ideal weight zone. Some people have even called me “athletic-looking”, which I think is a sycophantic way of saying “skinny”. Therefore, I thought I’d kindly share with you all how I manage it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of course, there’s the whole diet and exercise business. I mostly eat what I feel like eating, which is often large quantities of popcorn. I eat “real” food, too, I just don’t get overly excited about it. For exercise, I do a little body weight and dumbbell workout a couple of times a week, and play basketball a couple of times a week (but on a short court, because the running back and forth is the least fun part of basketball). Oh, and I take the stairs to the fourth floor at work. If I had to rate my fitness level, it’d be squarely in the “OK” range.<\/p>\n

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Hazards of exercise — yes, it was church basketball<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Things changed up a bit a couple of months ago when work sponsored a “Body Fat Blast-Off!” program. I had mostly sworn off employer-sponsored fitness challenges early in my career when it was determined in one program that pushing my lawnmower around my yard for 45 minutes didn’t count as exercise, but if I had just walked in concentric circles for 45 minutes then that was totally<\/em> exercise.<\/p>\n

What attracted me to this recent program was that they were going to start and end with a full body scan that is apparently the new gold standard for determining body composition. That seemed kind of cool.<\/p>\n

When I got my scan, I learned that my body fat percentage was 23.4%, which is at the high end of “average”. 25% or more would have been in the “above average” category, which by itself sounds like a nice category to be in — who doesn’t want to be “above average”? But for quantity of fat, it is sort of distressing. To be in the “fitness” category, I’d need to be at 17%, and “athlete” was clear down to 13%. The good news was that the fat I carry is almost perfectly distributed across my body — so while I have more than I might want, it is optimally hidden.<\/p>\n

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My body, apparently<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Knowing my precise fat levels shook my self-perception as a skinny person, and was therefore motivating. I decided that I would double the duration of my strength workouts (using the Nike Training Club app), and add a 2-3 mile run each week. Over the course of the two month program, I didn’t miss a workout except for a few days in Disneyland where I walked something like 8 miles per day. I was feeling pretty good, and the scale showed me down a few pounds from my starting weight.<\/p>\n

I was optimistic heading in to my end-of-program body scan. The result (drum roll…): I had lost 2.5 pounds — but it was all lean tissue. In other words, the result of my hard work was less<\/em> muscle, and a resulting increase<\/em> in my body fat percentage. I felt bitter and betrayed. Does that scanner thing even work, or is it totally bogus!? The guy going over my results wasn’t sure why I had poor results given the description of my exercise, but he decided that it was probably because I wasn’t eating enough, and especially protein.<\/p>\n

He recommended eating 1 gram of protein for every pound of body weight per day. OK, I guess I haven’t really kept track of how much protein I eat. So let’s see, eggs are supposed to be a good source of protein, right? They have (according to Google) 6 grams of protein. Cool, I just need to eat… 2 dozen eggs per day!?! Yeah, I guess I’m not eating enough protein.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t a total loss, though. My endurance is noticeably better — I played in a soccer game this week and didn’t require CPR after 3 minutes of sprinting. But in terms of advice on being a skinny person? I obviously don’t know. Maybe win the DNA lottery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to various formulas developed between 53 and 35 years ago, I’m right in my ideal weight zone. Some people have even called me “athletic-looking”, which I think is a sycophantic way of saying “skinny”. Therefore, I thought I’d kindly share with you all how I manage it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-familynews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1832,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}