I just wanted to agree on the point of how much of it is just genetics. I mean, I am not exactly thin - I have that Viking/farmer build thing going on where if it were a couple hundred years ago and I had to spend hours every day shoveling snow so I could feed the animals or plow the fields myself, and then survive on the last remnants of dried fish and turnips, I'd be fine. (Well, assuming I got hungry enough to eat salt cod. Blech.)
But I also put muscle on like nobody's business - Nic's seen me in person when I've been doing a lot of lifting and carrying on a routine basis, she can totally vouch for me that I had Lance arms - muscle definition that some 'fitness' model types would KILL for, just from daily life - no concerted effort to bulk up, no special diet - my body just naturally put on muscle mass in such an amount and such a way that it showed to a point which most women would honestly really have to work (and possibly take steroids or something) to manage - because that's how my body works.
And it's pretty clear that it's a genetic thing, because my dad does EXACTLY the same thing - he gets more mass due to being male, but we both put on muscle and develop muscle definition at the drop of a hat. (We have the same skeletal build, too, which I imagine is not coincidental - I have broad shoulders and a fairly deep rib cage and my bones in general, going by lack of having ever broken anything, seem pretty dense - exactly the sort of bone structure you'd need to support large amounts of muscle.) (Once I went on an open day for a crew team thing when I was at uni in England, and one of the crew members was seriously practically drooling over the structure of my shoulders/upper body. It was kind of creepy.)
I'm not saying this to be all 'yay me' but rather to point out - if I made any kind of effort at all to actually try to build muscle mass intentionally, I'd probably have pretty quick results that were simply unrealistic for people without my genetic cocktail. And yet if I were, say, a fitness model (meaning those semi-attractive women with muscle tone who aren't total body builders, but are more buff than 'normal') people would be asking for my secrets - and the fitness and diet industry would be trying to sell them on the idea that they too could get the same results with X magic product - even though the 'magic' in this case is that I've got a certain combination of genes or whatever it is exactly that makes my body respond to exertion in a specific way.
I guess at some point they'll be trying to figure out how to bottle THAT, which is just creepy, but until that point - we're all going to look how we look. There's some 'wiggle' room in that - I'm not always all buffed up, for example, if I'm not using the muscle regularly - but it's not so much that you can reasonably change the basics of how your body wants to be. (I mean, my mom just does not put on muscle mass at ALL. When she broke her leg and had PT to help her use a wheelchair and crutches more effectively, it took them FOREVER to build up her upper body, because even with the best possible scenario, it's just not something her body wants to do. Her body does not want to be able to step in and plow the field, should the oxen be sick one day. It's designed to be good at something different.)
no subject
But I also put muscle on like nobody's business - Nic's seen me in person when I've been doing a lot of lifting and carrying on a routine basis, she can totally vouch for me that I had Lance arms - muscle definition that some 'fitness' model types would KILL for, just from daily life - no concerted effort to bulk up, no special diet - my body just naturally put on muscle mass in such an amount and such a way that it showed to a point which most women would honestly really have to work (and possibly take steroids or something) to manage - because that's how my body works.
And it's pretty clear that it's a genetic thing, because my dad does EXACTLY the same thing - he gets more mass due to being male, but we both put on muscle and develop muscle definition at the drop of a hat. (We have the same skeletal build, too, which I imagine is not coincidental - I have broad shoulders and a fairly deep rib cage and my bones in general, going by lack of having ever broken anything, seem pretty dense - exactly the sort of bone structure you'd need to support large amounts of muscle.) (Once I went on an open day for a crew team thing when I was at uni in England, and one of the crew members was seriously practically drooling over the structure of my shoulders/upper body. It was kind of creepy.)
I'm not saying this to be all 'yay me' but rather to point out - if I made any kind of effort at all to actually try to build muscle mass intentionally, I'd probably have pretty quick results that were simply unrealistic for people without my genetic cocktail. And yet if I were, say, a fitness model (meaning those semi-attractive women with muscle tone who aren't total body builders, but are more buff than 'normal') people would be asking for my secrets - and the fitness and diet industry would be trying to sell them on the idea that they too could get the same results with X magic product - even though the 'magic' in this case is that I've got a certain combination of genes or whatever it is exactly that makes my body respond to exertion in a specific way.
I guess at some point they'll be trying to figure out how to bottle THAT, which is just creepy, but until that point - we're all going to look how we look. There's some 'wiggle' room in that - I'm not always all buffed up, for example, if I'm not using the muscle regularly - but it's not so much that you can reasonably change the basics of how your body wants to be. (I mean, my mom just does not put on muscle mass at ALL. When she broke her leg and had PT to help her use a wheelchair and crutches more effectively, it took them FOREVER to build up her upper body, because even with the best possible scenario, it's just not something her body wants to do. Her body does not want to be able to step in and plow the field, should the oxen be sick one day. It's designed to be good at something different.)