Diet & Fitness 

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Thin secrets: How I became thin without dieting

Are you gaining weight without knowing why? Author of Thin Secrets, Dr Lizzie Kingsley was until she realised that no one is naturally slim, it's all down to making the right lifestyle choices.

Everybody knows a 'naturally' slim person - the sort of person who can get away with eating whatever they please. They never diet; they don't need to because they are slim. We can easily spot them, they're all around us. For example, the girl at work who never refuses the doughnuts at coffee time, yet has a figure to die for. Whereas the rest of the room are exchanging the customary 'ooh I really shouldn't' and 'the diet starts tomorrow' comments, 'Miss Naturally thin' just eats and enjoys. How can she eat like that and get away with it? Is she just lucky? Surely there must be an explanation, but what is it?

Okay, I must admit, I was a skinny teenager. I don't know how many times I heard the phrase 'hollow legs' in my childhood, but once I left home all that stopped. People no longer commented on how slim I was, or asked me how I managed to eat so much without gaining an ounce. A good few years passed before it dawned on me that I had actually put on a fair bit of weight. At the time I didn't really understand how; it just happened slowly and steadily. Obviously, I should have twigged when I had to buy clothes in the next size up, but I always seemed to come up with an alternative explanation for why. The low point came when I realised that I was still gaining weight and I felt like I had no control over it. I couldn't really see what I had been doing to cause it and so I didn't feel like I could ever really lose it.

I tried dieting but never really got very far. I would only manage a week or two at a time and then give up. The joys of losing a few pounds would be quickly overshadowed by piling it straight back on again. Eventually, I got sick of this yo-yo existence so I decided to rebel - to stop dieting. Yet, I still wanted to be slim so I looked for another way of dealing with my weight. I started to try and work out what slim people do differently in order to maintain their enviable figures and along the way I learnt an awful lot about these mysterious creatures.

Nearly everyone I spoke to, both slim and overweight, thought being slim was pretty much down to luck, that some people were just naturally thin. It seemed to be a common way of explaining the unexplainable - how do some people get away with it whilst others aren't so fortunate? However, what I learnt about slim people surprised me.

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