Do you look like your mother?

I just watched a news video on Yahoo's front page today.

Way back during Vietnam, a soldier went off to war. There, he received a Dear John letter from his girl friend. She was breaking up with him, and she was pregnant. But she was going to give the child up for adoption.

Apparently the man came home and tried to find his child, to no avail.

Until two weeks ago, when they did find each other.

No DNA test needed.

There was video of them together - and they looked exactly alike. The 40 year old son was balding, his dad was bald. The 40 year old son was in law enforcement. After getting out of the military, dad had gone into law enforcement too.

And both of them were overweight. 60 year old and 40 year old had the exact same paunch!

Just goes to show that genetics plays a key role in one's weight. If your parents are overweight, chances are you will be too.

And not necessarily because you eat too much - although in many people that is a factor, of course.

But because of a genetic tendency to overweight. Especially for people with big frames. Women with wide hips will typically weigh more than women with small bones and narrow hips.

That's just the way it is.

But if you're a wide-hipped woman who looks at a thin-hipped woman longingly and thinks, "I wish I had her body," don't wish too hard, you might get it.

This happened to me as a teen. I got a job at a McDonalds. A girl started there, a couple of inches taller than me, small breasts and hips (as opposed to my large breasts and wide hips) and I wished I had her body... until I found out that she was an epileptic - she had a seizure one day, right in the store - and found myself all of a sudden very happy that I was me and not her.

We can not change our bone structure. We can not change our metabolism. (Any attempt to speed up our metabolism by taking some kind of over the counter pill is very dangerous - all that does is speed up your heart rate - not healthy.)

We must know ourselves, and work within ourselves to achieve our ideal weight and our ideal health.

Let's do that in 2012.