You are the sum total of your social and physical heredity. Your physical heredity was not of your choice and neither were your initial interactions with society and the rest of your new environment. Other than plastic surgery, your physical attributes cannot be changed by will. Your current social environment however can be.
Your environment is up to you to change if it not to your benefit right now. You can change it at will. Being a young child, we absorb everything that reaches our minds through our five physical senses. Through these senses we take in information that we use to create ideas and ways of thinking. It eventually forms a part of who we are as in the case of our mental attitude. It also controls how we behave.
After the first 6 to 10 years of our life, our mind is almost set even without consciously knowing that we can choose. Social heredity includes what we learn from schools, parents, family, friends, religion, and the books we read. It is what goes on in the environment in which we live. Our given genes "react" to our environment.
The habits we created when we were a child will be harder to break now since they have been with us for a long time. It is not impossible to break them but it will take effort. The environment we live in is very important to us and will have a sense of control on you if you believe it or not.
Think of a person who is always positive and happy and place them in a house with 3 extremely negative people that always look on the down side of life. One of two things will happen over a long period of time:
The positive person will become just as negative as the others or they will find a way out.
The fat gene - do you have it?
So we don't have a choice in what we look like and the genetics we inherit. Could genes be stopping you from losing weight? Chances are you probably do not have the so called "fat" gene. But if so, how do you know? One of the most used excuses for being overweight or obese is saying that genetics prevents weight loss. Not true.
Genetics definitely plays a role in the physical structure of the body but not when it comes to being fat and unhealthy. What genes may control is how your body processes different foods and nutrients, or in other words; how it processes the energy and nutrients from the foods. For example, one person may be able to eat a loaf of bread and not gain a pound while another person may eat the same loaf of bread and gain weight fast. This could be a genetic factor but it will also include a number of other factors.
Factors including if the previous generations in your family went through a period of famine. In a time where there is no food, pregnant mothers could pass on a mutated gene to the child that is still inside the womb. This "gene" won't make the child fat, but it may store more energy than normal in the fat cells so that if there is another time when food is scarce, the individual will have the extra stored energy needed to get by.
