Author: Tiffany Vincent

Something about seeing a familiar face on TV makes you feel as tho something has changed, even tho you can’t quite put your finger on it. Over the past year, viewers of CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront have observed precisely that. The anchor appears more slender. More angular. Distinct in a way that is difficult to describe on a screen. Naturally, the internet began talking, as it always does. Observations started to appear in Reddit threads. According to some viewers, Burnett appeared “thin and gaunt.” Others conjectured about eye work, buccal fat removal, and cosmetic procedures. As is often the case…

Where you stand, what you eat, and how your body moves through the world can all be altered by certain losses. That moment came early on November 13, 2022, for Alivea Goncalves, the oldest of five children raised in Idaho, when her phone rang with news that no family should ever have to deal with. Kaylee, her younger sister and a University of Idaho senior, had been murdered. Together with Kaylee’s roommates Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Kernodle’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin, Bryan Kohberger broke into the off-campus residence on King Road and killed Kaylee. When the majority of the nation…

Nearly every NFL training camp has a moment when someone walks onto the grass and simply looks different. Not just bigger, not just leaner—different in a way that causes teammates to slow down and coaches to cast sidelong glances. Apparently, that’s what transpired when Travis Hunter arrived in Jacksonville this summer. It didn’t take long for the conversation to leave the practice area and end up everywhere else. Hunter is currently listed at 185 pounds after gaining 10 pounds during the offseason. That figure seems modest on paper. The implications are quite different in reality. After tearing his lateral collateral…

Every few years, some people in the music business reinvent themselves in an effort to stay relevant by using fresh aesthetics or sounds. Then there is Missy Elliott, who decided to improve her health without really making a big announcement, somewhere between a life-threatening diagnosis and a quiet personal reckoning. To be honest, that restraint says something. Elliott made it public in 2011 that she had been suffering from Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid, for about three years. In her case, the condition had gotten so bad that it was interfering with her ability to move.…

Somewhere in the middle of Tammy Slaton’s story, there’s a scene that keeps grabbing your attention. The surgery isn’t the problem. Even the 500 pounds isn’t as startling as that amount. It’s the picture of her reading a number below 220 on a junkyard scale in Kentucky, the same scale she had used six years prior when she weighed more than 600 pounds. Amy, her sister, is standing close by. They both appear to be attempting to maintain emotional stability. It’s the type of television moment that, in its purest form, feels unscripted. A regular on TLC’s 1000-Lb is Tammy…

A clinic address in Mayfair carries a certain kind of quiet confidence. On any weekday morning, Clarges Street feels like a postcode that takes itself seriously, with polished brass plaques, Georgian architecture, and the occasional person in a suit walking quickly by. The Mayfair Weight Loss Clinic has established itself in this context, and it is doing so more and more thanks to the medication Mounjaro. Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, manufactures Mounjaro, a once-weekly injectable pen with tirzepatide as its active ingredient. Although it was first created to control blood sugar levels in adults with type 2 diabetes,…

Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper is an old piece of nutrition advice that is frequently shared. It may sound like folklore, but it has more rigorous scientific support than the majority of contemporary dietary recommendations. For decades, the notion that eating alters how your body absorbs nutrients has been viewed as, at best, a minor concern. The conventional wisdom maintains that calories in, calories out. It doesn’t matter what time it is. It’s getting more difficult to defend that position. Nearly all metabolic processes in the body follow the circadian rhythm,…

It’s obvious that the conventional weight gain advice—eat more, eat bigger, eat everything—was written by someone who has never sat in front of a plate of food, felt truly full after four bites, and been told to keep going. That strategy doesn’t simply work for people with small appetites. The bloated, uncomfortable feeling of having forced down more food than the body wanted, followed by hours of not being hungry at all, and then missing the next meal completely, are the typical symptoms of this type of misery. The excess calories that were meant to build up never do. The…

The notion that eating more food causes weight gain is so ingrained in popular culture that challenging it seems almost unconventional. However, anyone who has spent time with someone who struggles to gain weight despite eating large meals or who has attempted to bulk up but found the scale stubbornly unmoved already knows intuitively that the equation is more complicated than it seems. The scientific community concurs. The body does not fill up when more is added; it is not a passive container. It is an active system that modifies its energy consumption in response to incoming energy. Adaptive thermogenesis…

In Reddit threads, nutrition clinics, and gyms, there is a recurring dialogue that almost always ends the same way. When a friend who is thin eats a big meal, someone who has trouble losing weight may conclude that friend has a miraculous metabolism. In contrast, the slender friend actually thinks they eat a lot. They are both telling the truth. The majority of the picture is simply missing from both of them. The eating patterns that actually make gaining weight difficult are not particularly dramatic. Most of the time, they are not even deliberate. No matter how sincerely the person…