You're on a diet. You’re exercising six days a week and eating nothing but carrots and broccoli. You are desperate to lose weight. You lean in and ask the thin woman next to you how she stays so skinny, and to your disgust, she tells you she doesn't do anything. She never exercises and eats whatever she wants. It's not fair. It's exactly this type of situation that leads us to believe that weight is determined on a genetic and metabolic level.
There may be hope for the rest of us who don't have the "skinny" gene. Researchers are working on a diet based on metabolism. Metabolomics is an area under study at the moment. It's a unique way your body reacts to cellular changes or your metabolic reactions. Basically, studying metabolites and how they change after you eat is helping scientists learn how to treat obesity in people with varying metabolic rates.
The field of metabolics shows a lot of promise for a new wave of weight loss drugs. The information provided by the studies on metabolites will be a useful tool in fighting the obesity epidemic. It will help us understand lipid dysfunction.
According to an article, New Research Promises Personalized Dietary Guidelines, in ScienceDaily (Dec, 2007), a simple blood test could reveal metabolism problems. "Physicians then develop a customized diet designed to work with the patient's metabolism, while follow-up blood tests could allow caregivers to track improvements in a person's health status."
We've all had that friend that's lost all of her excess weight on the Atkins diet or using Jenny Craig. We get excited, we get on board with the program they used, we work hard and yet something isn't right. You don't seem to lose weight the same way the other person did. Our genetic makeup is not the same; therefore, the same diet will not work for every person.
The most successful weight loss programs are ones that are customized to meet a person's specific needs. Studying the way metabolism is affected by food will help scientists and doctors measure metabolism and use the information to create a diet that will work for that specific person.