Just when you finally come to terms with the fact that you have to hem all your jeans (which let’s face it never look quite the same) and you’ll never be able to reach the top shelf of the pantry comes news that it’s also harder to lose weight if you’re short. Great.
A study published in the medical journal PLOS ONE looked at 330 “healthy” volunteers with differing age, sex and BMI and found that the variance between individuals related to “scaling of organ mass to height and weight and, thus, the constitution-related variances in either fat free mass (FFM) or kidneys, muscle, brain and liver (model 2) explained up to 43% of the inter-individual variance in Resting energy expenditure (REE).”
Which basically means us shorties have slower metabolisms than our long-legged friends.
“Short women have slower metabolisms,” Craig Primack, M.D., president-elect of the Obesity Medicine Association tells Women’s Health.
“The average woman has a basal metabolic rate (BMR) of 1,400 calories per day. That means, if she lays in bed for 24 hours, she will burn 1,400 calories. But I see women who are shorter than 5 feet with BMRs of 1,200 calories, and some who are 5’10” or so at 1,750 or more per day.”
Basically that means the smaller the body, the smaller the organs, the less energy the body needs – and hence the less energy it burns naturally or REE.
So the key then is outsmarting your metabolism, by choosing the right foods to get it working with you and not against you.
Maybe it’s for the best then that we can’t reach the sweets on the top shelf…
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