Weight gain

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to gain a pretty large amount of weight over the course of a couple decades.

If you start out weighing 180 pounds at age 20, gaining just 1% of body weight on average each year puts you up to approximately 220 pounds by age 40.

Of course weight gain is not linear. The same weight journey from 180 to 2020 pounds might in practice look something closer to this:

Yes, gaining 40 pounds is a lot. It’s a little more than 20% of the starting weight in this example, so it’s not massive or unrealistic. The problem is how hard it is to notice over a long enough time horizon because it’s so incremental.

Here’s the truly scary part — this 40 pound increase, at 1% of body weight per year, ends up being only an annual increase of about 2 pounds!