[HPforGrownups] Re: British food.

[Jenett]

No: HPFGUIDX 31320

Catherine Wrote:
> The other point about exercise - we have discussed on this list 
> before, in relation to the heaviness of the traditionally British 
> Hogwarts food, that it is a wonder that all the children aren't 
> grossly overweight.  

First point: 
We don't see them getting lots of exercise, per se. (Other than 
walking to Hogsmeade, or however far it is to Hagrid's cottage from the 
front door. Or however energetic Quidditch is - horseback riding, for 
example, is a lot higher calorie burning than you'd think, because it 
involves all sorts of small motor control movements to keep your balance 
and steer. So I'd think Quidditch would be at least somewhat more 
energetic than sitting in a chair, and possibly more so than walking.) 

However, even though we don't see a lot of explicit exercise (which we 
don't), we also have no idea how far the distances are in the school - 
except that we know it's a very big school. 

Second point: 
When I was at boarding school, we had smallish dorms (6 to 40 people in
each) and most of them were converted mid-sized houses. My cluster of
dorms was a good 10 minute walk (if you pushed it, most people took more
like 15) from the main academic quad and the dining hall. Most of us did
that walk at least 4 times a day, plus some level of required athletics.
(whether that was supervised walking for 20-40 minutes, or something more
energetic.) That's 40-90 minutes of walking every day, depending on how 
many times you went back and forth, and how energetic you were. 

I'm wondering if there might be a reasonable similar effect at Hogwarts - 
the simple act of walking from bedroom to dining hall to class to class to 
dining hall to outside for Care of Magical Creatures, and so forth might 
not be providing a good bit more exercise than is immediately apparent. 

Third point: 
Combine that with the usually high metabolisms of many teens, and the fact
that there's a lot less pressure to severely mess up your eating patterns
becuase some of the conventional modern pressures for attractiveness
aren't in your face all the time (fashion magazines, TV, advertising,
etc.), and you might just end up with people with healthy appetites, but
who have well balanced appetites for their metabolism, and who therefore
don't gain much excess weight, because the point between "I'm no 
longer hungry" and "If I eat more than this, I'll be taking in more 
calories than I need" is the same. 

Research into why people gain weight is still evolving, but there seem to
be strong indications that dieting - and particularly during puberty -
messes up your metabolism in some subtle ways that no one really
understands well yet. Some people bounce back from that, or commit to
perpetual dieting, but people who never did diet don't have the same
issues. 

But in a number of people, it seems like what dieting does is confuse the
brain, so that you still feel hungry after eating 'enough', or that your
hunger no longer becomes a reliable guide for whether you need to eat, or
that your body starts treating any food like it must be stored for a
future famine/diet. These can take a long time to recover even partially
from, and no one really has a good solution yet, honestly.

But in a population which is largely *isolated* from a lot of those 
pressures for various reasons (we don't see a lot of emphasis on physical 
attractiveness in the sense of body size, at least in the sense that 
people *want* to change their body size, though we do get descriptions of 
unpleasant characters as large - Dudley, Crabbe, Goyle), you might well 
not get these problems in the first place. Combined with an hour or so of 
walking around the castle to get to places every day, you'd end up with 
a reasonably healthy balance. 

-Jenett