Does Your Gender Affect Your Weight?
Gender has a significant impact on a person’s physiology, and it can influence their metabolism and response to exercise. It can influence body weight, body composition, fat distribution, and hormonal activity, all of which affect the way a person looks and performs.
Understanding about the roles of gender in body weight and body composition is important for knowing how to maintain a healthy weight. This article will take a deep dive into this subject, splitting it up into various categories.
Gender and Body Composition
Generally, men have more skeletal muscle relative to body fat than women because they have much higher levels of testosterone, an anabolic (building) hormone. Because of their higher concentrations of testosterone compared to women, men will respond to resistance training (weightlifting) more so than women and will put muscle on more easily.
Skeletal muscle is an ‘expensive’ tissue, meaning the body requires more calories to maintain it than it does to maintain fat mass.
Therefore, somebody with more skeletal muscle and less body fat will have a higher basal metabolic rate (BMR) and will burn more calories at rest. In turn, they will find it easier to maintain or lose weight if that’s their goal. You can learn more about why men find it easier to lose weight by clicking here.
Evolutionarily, women store more body fat than men, particularly around their lower abdomen, with a healthy body fat range being 25-30% for women of reproductive age (compared with 18-25% for men). This is due to the biological need for extra energy and physical safety around the uterus when a woman is pregnant.
Gender and Hormones
Hormones are more influential than most people realize. Fluctuations in hormones can have a significant impact on physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
The biological differences between the hormonal profiles of men and women are a key factor in why gender impacts body weight. The predominant reproductive hormone in females is estrogen, which promotes fat storage, particularly around the hips and thighs.
In males, the predominant hormone is testosterone, which promotes muscle growth and a more even distribution of body fat. However, testosterone can cause increased deposition of fat around the abdomen in obese men.
Gender and Social Factors
There are social factors to consider when talking about the correlation between gender and weight.
As a generalization, women feel more pressure to look slimmer and keep their body fat within or below the healthy range. Therefore, they may be more prone to taking drastic measures to lose weight, such as crash diets or overexercising with high-intensity interval training or cardio. They are also more likely to develop eating disorders like anorexia nervosa as a result.
On the other hand, men often feel more pressure to build a muscular physique and look ‘bulky’, which may encourage them to eat more food in order to get bigger. Generally, men are more likely to lift heavy weights in the gym to build a strong and muscular physique, which will also influence their dietary decisions.