Mummy Fitness
"Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics." ~ Inemesit Graham
mummy-fitness.com
ISSA Certified Fitness Trainer
Canfitpro Personal Training Specialist
Expert in Diastasis Recti
05/02/2024
When we learned about the slave trade, the whole class looked at me. Many, if not all, assumed it was my history. It was the first time we had learned about Black people in school.
We learned about Napoleon and his army, Edison and his lightbulb, Nightingale and her medicine, Darwin and his finches, Bell and his telephone. White leaders, white medics, white scientists, white inventors. Then we learned about the slave trade and the Civil Rights Movement.
Slaves. That's how my peers saw my history. Freed slaves. During the lesson, my peers directed most questions at me. At lunch break I was asked about the struggle of my ancestors; I was told how wonderful it must be to be free.
Slavery isn’t Black history. Slavery disrupted Black history. The transatlantic slave trade is the history of European colonization. It is white history. “The conquerors write history, they came, they conquered, and they wrote. You don’t expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us,” said Miriam Makeba, South African singer, actress and activist.
Hippocrates was not the father of medicine, Imhotep was. Hippocrates studied medicine at the library of Imhotep’s temple 2,000 years after Imhotep’s death and leveraged and built on his concepts. But Hippocrates, a European, is remembered while Imhotep, an African, is forgotten.
Henry Ford was not the first American manufacturer of the automobile, C.R. Patterson was. Patterson created the "horseless carriage" in 1860, 46 years before Ford built his first car, but Ford is given credit as the first manufacturer of automobiles in the U.S. and Patterson is forgotten.
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician whose calculations were critical to NASA's first crewed space flights including Apollo 11 and 13. Paul E. Williams was an American architect who invented the first helicopter, the Lockheed Model 186. Dr. Gladys West invented the first Global Positioning System (GPS).
Black history is not slavery. Black history is history.
📸 Angela Gzowski Photography
31/01/2024
A lot of fitness psychology operates from the perspective that your body is broken. From this perspective exercise is about fixing what is broken.
I reject that premise. Your body is not broken and does not need to be fixed. Your body adapts to your environment, and change is achieved by altering the environment in which you exist.
If someone kicks me in the leg and it causes me pain, I do not blame my leg for reacting with pain, I blame the person for kicking me. I may respond by changing my proximity to that person. As such, when we experience pain in our bodies, we should not blame our bodies for reacting to its environment but should seek to understand the environment that created the pain, and adapt accordingly.
In the words of Alexander Den Heijer, “when a flower doesn't bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower”.
It is important to decolonize our fitness practices because this premise of brokenness is born of the ideology of white supremacy. White supremacy is a political, economic, and cultural system in which white people overwhelmingly control power and material resources, where conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are re-enacted daily across a broad array of institutions and social settings.
Most studies relating to sports performance are done on white men by other white men. Any deviation from a standard determined by white men for other white men is considered abnormal.
A study published in July 2023 in The Journal of Sports Medicine found that gender research gaps in exercise science negatively impact cisgender women putting them at risk for injury, misdiagnosis, and mistreatment. An audit of official exercise guidelines found they were overwhelmingly based on studies written by white cisgender men about white cisgender men. More than 9 out 10 lead authors in fitness literature are men. Less than 25% of leadership roles in editorial boards in sports sciences are women. Less than 25% of first and last authorship on scientific publications are women. Less than 20% of team doctors in both collegiate and professional sports are women. Of these statistics, Black women account for less than 5% of people in sports leadership roles.
Your body is not broken, you just don’t have the body of a small percentage of college-aged white men.
BMI is a racist standard and calling people overweight or obese pepetuates systemic oppression.
Weight categories feel oppressive because they were created to oppress.
I don't do yoga. I stretch.
Yoga is a spiritual practice rooted in Hinduism. It is meant to connect mind, body, and spirit. Yoga isn't an exercise; it's a code of living.
When Kim Kardashian cornrowed her hair, what annoyed black women was, not that she was embracing a style of hair we have worn for milennia; it was that she called it Bo Braids, crediting the style to a white woman.
The name Bo Braids referred to the actress Bo Derek, who wore cornrows in the movie 10, a strategic move to garner attention. She copied the style from black women.
Cornrows are a hairstyle thousands of years old that originated in West Africa. The name is because the style looks like rows of corn in a field. Cornrows are a protective style of hair designed to help curly, coily, and tight-textured hair retain moisture. They became revolutionary during the enslavement of West African people in the global North as it was a way for those escaping slavery to hide food such as grains and rice for the journey. The food was hidden underneath the rows of hair.
The difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation is that appreciation means recognizing the qualities of something. It means understanding the context of an experience.
Cultural appreciation is studying yoga within the context of Hinduism. It means knowing the history and context of that practice, not just being a really flexible person.
Appropriation means the taking of something without honoring the owner or the qualities of the thing which you are taking.
Cultural appropriation is calling cornrows, Bo Braids. Cultural appropriation is whitewashing the history of West African people.
You cannot practice yoga without understanding the tenants of Hinduism. Going to yoga classes doesn't make you a yogi; it makes you someone who goes to yoga classes. Being able to hold difficult yoga poses doesn't make you a yogi. It means you're a person who is physically strong and flexible.
I don’t do yoga, I stretch.
24/09/2023
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics. Or your efforts. Or the wholeness of your body.
I was watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix. It's a documentary that looks into social media and the intention behind it. Tech experts who worked for various social network platforms talked about how we, humans, have become the commodity. Social media is a tool not only to sell to us but to influence how we think so we can be sold to.
Companies began with mining commodities from the planet such as oil and minerals, but today, we are the commodity. They are mining us.
If we believe our bodies are whole, then we cannot be sold quick fixes. We must be first convinced that we are broken and then a solution can be sold to us.
Until this week I hadn't been to a gym in 2 months. In that time, I had done 2 workouts. My body at this moment is not reflective of my workouts this week. I've been strength training for 10 years. I'm leaner this week, but it's not because of a conscious change in diet. It's because of months of uncontrollable changes.
My dad died in April, and I have been grieving him since. The sadness has impacted my appetite. I was on vacation for 3 weeks and then displaced from my home for a further 4 weeks because of wildfires. I haven't had access to my kitchen or my usual snacks in months. The evacuation was expensive and impacted my finances significantly. As a result, I am making more frugal choices, which also affects grocery planning. I've been stressed. I've been sad.
My body has changed, but not because of willpower, a 6-week program, a supplement, or a shake. I have leaned out because of life. My body has responded to the changes I am experiencing.
We often judge our bodies harshly for changing, but our bodies respond to situations. When I coach people, I look at the circumstances to which their bodies are reacting, and we make progress by looking at ways to adapt to these circumstances. Your body is not broken, but sometimes your environment is.
But you can't sell that.
Not everything that glitters is gold.
When you scroll social media, remember you're being marketed to. Your insecurities are the new oil.
Join me Yellowknife Racquet Club for an Introduction to Kettlebell Fitness. Kettlebells are a versatile piece of equipment, ideal for a full body strength workout, low impact cardio, building core strength and stability, building grip strength, and developing explosive power.
This class is for all fitness levels.
The session will include a 10 - to 15-minute warm-up, a 45-minute workout, and snacks and socializing in the beautiful RC lobby afterward.
This entire event is free and is sponsored by NWT Recreation and Parks Association - NWTRPA.
Registration is limited to 10 people. Register by email to [email protected].
I shared a post showing my relaxed belly and stating that everyone's belly sticks out. I explained that the role of muscles is to respond to the demands of your body and they do this by relaxing and contracting. I got one of two genres of responses. The first was by those who felt validated by seeing another woman embrace a belly that sticks just like their own does, and one who also bears the signs of pregnancy just like they do.
The other side was of those who were somehow offended by me stating that healthy, fit and normal bellies distend, those confused that I could embrace my body as it manifests, those convinced I need a surgical intervention to keep my belly washboard flat at all times, and those that suggested I was just trying to normalise bellies sticking out because I was upset mine isn't flat.
The thing is, mine is flat. Sometimes. It also sticks out. Sometimes. Healthy, fit, normal bellies stick out.
My belly is flatter when it's empty; I have intestines behind my skin, so when I eat, my abdomen swells in response to the new content within it. My belly is flatter if I am wearing anything compressive because it pushes it in. A lot of fitness leggings today offer compression. My belly is flatter if I flex it and draw my muscles in. My belly is flatter when I am lifting a load.
My belly isn't flat when I eat. Or at certain times of the month because of the way estrogen and progesterone interact during my menstrual cycle. My belly isn't flat when I relax it. My belly isn't flat when I breathe in deeply. It isn't as flat as it was before I had 3 kids. Since then my abdominal muscles and skin have stretched 3 times to allow me to carry those children, and my body bears the marks of that.
There is nothing wrong with having a body that has adapted and shows that adaptation. The strength of our bodies is in its ability to adapt.
I exercise not to make my belly flat because it's appearance is influenced by so much. I exercise so I can achieve a level of fitness that allows me to accomplish the tasks I desire.
Fitness doesn't have a look. Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics.
A trainer I used to follow once advised her followers to wear tight fitting tops so it would remind them to always suck their belly in. This trainer had thousands of followers and was often admired for her abs; Her flexed abs. And evidently, based on her advice to others, she flexed her abs all the time.
Abs are not designed to stay flexed. Your abs are part of your core muscles and a role of your core muscles is pressure management. Your core muscles do this by relaxing and contracting.
When they relax they help lower pressure, when they contract they help increase pressure.
When you breathe in you increase the pressure in your body by adding content (air) to it. Your abs respond to this increase in pressure by relaxing. This lowers and thus stabilizes intra-abdominal pressure. When you exhale you remove content from your body (air). This lowers the pressure. Your abs respond by contracting thus increasing pressure and stabilizing the body. This muscle response helps your body maintain a constant level of intra-abdominal pressure. Your abs can either respond to pressure changes or you can train them not to.
Your body adapts according to your habits. Constantly flexed muscles adapt by shortening. Shortened muscles cannot expand as easily. Muscle shortness and tightness and the inability to respond to pressure changes can lead to a variety of issues including incontinence, hernias and pain.
I don't know if this trainer experienced this but what I do know is that the images she shared of herself were flexed. It was not a relaxed body staring back at itself in the mirror, the way we do when judging our bellies. Her body as she presented it online was not her body as it was when relaxed.
Your body is not supposed to look one way; it can look many ways depending on what you are doing.
Flat bellies are not synonymous with strong bellies.
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics, or your value as a Trainer.
22/03/2023
After finishing an 80lb deadlift my client told me, "my doctor finally gave me permission to lift 30lbs." She laughed. "I told him to talk to my trainer."
She had been told she shouldn't lift above 10lbs because of a hernia repair. Much like with diastasis recti, the concern about lifting with hernias is around pressure management.
A hernia in adults is the result of abdominal weakness and increased intra-abdominal pressure that leads to a tear in a weak spot through which abdominal tissues protrude.
The concern with hernias post surgery is that an incision creates a point of weakness, and high intra-abdominal pressure to a weak area can cause herniation.
The problem is, high intra-abdominal pressure is unavoidable, and generic guidelines like "don't lift more than 10lbs" don't consider the pressure generated when someone screams, or coughs, or pushes a trunk closed, or forces a gate open, or runs across a street after a fleeing child. I worked with a client who had no issues benching 100lbs but struggled getting up from her back. The pressure that bothered her wasn't the pressure of the weights, it was the intra-abdominal pressure generated to allow her body to sit-up.
You cannot avoid situations where your body will generate high levels of intra-abdominal pressure and these situations exist 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 of weight lifting.
What you can do is train your body for it. You can learn different pressure management strategies. You can build strength. You can give your body options.
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics.
Training with Abdominal Hernias Recorded for Fit2B Bits, Bones & Booties Conference
1) Bellies are not supposed to be flat all the time.
2) You think bellies are supposed to be flat because of white supremacy.
I've heard it asked how the beauty standard when from Venus de Milo to Barbie. It went there because of white supremacy.
Venus de Milo was a (European) standard of beauty before the mass enslavement of African people, and the centuries of oppression that followed.
After Venus de Milo there was The Hottentot Venus.
Saartjie Bartman (a First Nations person from South Africa) was taken to Europe in the 19th century and put on display in freak shows because of her big hips and bum.
Baartman was displayed in cages and marketed as the Hottentot Venus, "the missing link between man and beast". Her body became a point of focus when racial studies was beginning in France.
The Hottentot Venus was so popular that it inspired the bustle, a 19th century clothing trend where a dress was sewn with padding at the back to create an artificial hump around the bum.
Bartmann was treated as inferior, her body s*xualized and her features worn as a costume by European women.
Over in the U.S., colonists were pushing the stereotype of the mammy. A mammy is an image enslaved Black women who worked within white households. The mammy is characterised as a large, dark skinned woman. Enslaved African women were often r***d by their enslavers and forced to become wet nurses and caregivers to their enslavers children so were associated with motherhood and looking "motherly".
During this time Slyvester Graham was leading the Grahamites through the first recorded diet, consisting of bland foods and whole grains. Graham believed the rich seasoned foods of Black and Indigenous people was the reason for their different bodies and that it led moral degeneration and too much s*x. Doctors worried the strict diet would lead to extreme weight loss so the Grahamites began to weigh themselves to prove their diet was healthy.
White supremacy seeks to distinguish whiteness from blackness and since these are genetically meaningless terms, it created an aesthetic for whiteness.
Your aesthetics do not determine your athletics.
08/03/2023
Celebrating some of my favorite womanist thinkers this international women's day.
This month I'm recognizing Women's History Month by drawing portraits of womanist thinkers I admire.
Featured:
➡️ Maya Angelou
➡️ bell hooks
➡️ Audre Lorde
➡️ Upile Chisala
➡️ Selam Debs
➡️ Toni Morrison (WIP)
Who should I add to this list? Give me your suggestions in the comments.
17/02/2023
Inemesit's journey to becoming a business owner specializing in fitness began after her second pregnancy, when she found her body didn't "snap back" from childbirth the way other people seemed to.
"I started to think there was something wrong with my body," she said — a fear that had been with her all her life.
Born in Nigeria, Graham moved to England when she was 5. There, as the only Black child in her class throughout elementary and middle school, she was bullied for hernias she had. At 6 years of age, she had surgery to close the hernia, but it wasn't successful.
"I feel like I've gone through an existence where my body has always been othered, and I was made to feel like my body didn't fit the dominant narrative about bodies," she said.
"Experiencing that, postpartum and being taught again that I needed surgery so my body could meet the standards that other people thought it should meet was very triggering to me."
Strength training began as a way to push back against the idea that surgery was the only option to "fix" her body. As she got stronger, she found herself doing things people told her she couldn't do.
"I was being taught I couldn't lift heavy weights with hernias, but I was," she said.
She also has diastasis, which involves the abdominal muscles being separated during pregnancy.
"I was told that needed to be closed and returned to its pre-pregnancy state for my body to be functional. 10 years later I'm able to do more athletically than a lot of people can," she said.
She realized much of the fitness information that exists today comes from studies that didn't include Black or female bodies. On top of that, she noted, Black bodies have been stigmatized as a result of the slave trade, colonization and generations of people being told that Black people were less than human.
"My tagline that I put on my website, is, 'Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics.' Although it started as a journey to find liberation within my body, I've learned that our freedom is tied — nobody can be free until everybody is free," she said.
"By sharing messages around my body and decolonizing my worldview and sharing a different narrative around my body, I find that people's bodies that don't fit the dominant narrative feel seen, heard and included."
🔗
Braids, haircuts and fitness: Black business owners in Yellowknife talk about their journeys | CBC News To mark Black History Month, Black business owners in the N.W.T. share their journeys. Meet the barbershop duo who offer the only hair-braiding service in Yellowknife, and the personal trainer who has spent years building up strength, fitness and her own confidence.
𝗨𝗻𝗽𝗼𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝘅 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶.
Diastasis recti has not been shown to be a cause of pain or a contraindication to movement.
While diastasis recti is often treated as dysfunction, I would argue it is adaptation.
Dysfunction means an abnormality or impairment in the function of a bodily organ or system. Your abs responding to pregnancy by relaxing and your linea stretching to allow a fetus to grow is not dysfunction. It is a necessary part of pregnancy ; it is your body functioning as it should. Pregnancy requires adaptation and adaptation requires relearning.
Diastasis isn't a failure of the system, it's a response of the system. You need strategies, not lists of exercises.
You need movement options not movement obstacles.
Here's what the research tells us:
1️⃣ Women with diastasis recti have no higher prevalence of pelvic floor dysfunction, low back or pelvic girdle pain than women without diastasis recti.
🔗 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33691943/
2️⃣ There is no connection between diastasis recti and pelvic floor dysfunction, even with the severity of inter-rectus distance increasing.
🔗 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33588826/
3️⃣ The prevalence of a mild diastasis recti was high both during pregnancy and after childbirth. Women with and without diastasis recti reported the same amount of lower back pain 12 months postpartum.
🔗 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27324871/
4️⃣ Diastasis recti is not a risk factor for stress urinary incontinence.
🔗 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31783196/
5️⃣ Women with diastasis recti were not more likely to have weakened pelvic floor muscle strength and increased urinary or pelvic organ prolapse at 6-8 weeks postpartum.
🔗 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31197430/
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics!
Years ago during my personal training certification prospective personal trainers were asked to assess each other's posture based on an image in a textbook. A fellow PT announced of my body, which represented the only Black body on the course, "you have a pelvic tilt and a prominent lumbar lordosis".
"I don't have lumbar lordosis" I replied. "I have a dip in my low back and a bum that grows outwards the same as my mum, my grandma, and my aunties!"
Ethnic differences in spinopelvic parameters are poorly defined in literature. When the bodies of women of European descent were compared to those of African descent significant differences in sagittal spinopelvic parameters were seen (PMID 30143898).
According to the Anesthesiology Journal, a pronounced lumbar lordosis in Black people has been well described, and it is assumed that this hyperlordosis is connected with a slightly greater forward tilt of the pelvis. However, the forward tilt is not simply a matter of posture but is determined by the structural features of the vertebrae and the pelvis.
In African American women, the posterior pelvic floor area is 10.4% smaller than in European American women, resulting in a 5.1% smaller total pelvic floor area (PMID 12114898).
In the US and Canada, racial disparities in maternal health care are prevalent. Compounding factors like interpersonal and institutional racism, poverty, poor health care access and environmental burdens disproportionately harm Black people. These contribute to pregnancy-related deaths being 4x times higher for Black people than white people.
Limited prescriptions of what constitutes a “normal” pelvis or birthing process lead doctors to perform unnecessary interventions, like induced labor, c-sections, or the use of forceps which can further exacerbate harm. Genetic factors appear to have a substantial influence on lumbar lordosis and lumbar sagittal flexibility (PMID 32920227).
A clinician's assumption that Black people have a greater lordosis than white people is based on an apparent increased lordosis due to more prominent buttocks (PMID 2711246).
Consider the context of a body before you project white supremacist patriarchal standards upon it.
Here is another workout from the bi-weekly Senior Fitness class I teach. This is a class attended by women 60+ with a focus of building strength through low impact resistance training.
We begin with a 10 minute warm-up followed by a 35 minute circuit and end with 5 minute cool down stretching.
Repeat each exercise for 40 seconds followed by 10 seconds of rest for 4 rounds (40s on / 20s off x 4). Rest for one minute before moving to the next exercise.
1️⃣ Banded Seated Abduction
2️⃣ Banded Box Squat
𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏: https://youtu.be/qvSSnU5hhWo
3️⃣ Split Lunge
𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏: https://youtube.com/shorts/DUuNRQPcCeU?feature=share
4️⃣ Seated Single-arm Arnold Press
𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏: https://youtube.com/shorts/JRHKArNkDZI?feature=share
5️⃣ Seated Hammer Curl
𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏: https://youtu.be/3Qhts4-h9hg
6️⃣ Banded Lateral Walk
𝑬𝒙𝒆𝒓𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝒃𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒅𝒐𝒘𝒏: https://youtube.com/shorts/dBLO1csahaI?feature=share
7️⃣ Box Lateral Toe Taps
05/02/2023
Hannah Eden Photography made magic happen! 😍✨️
"Your body is a sight of liberation. It doesn't belong to capitalism. Love your body. Rest your body. Move your body. Hold your body" - Tricia Hersey
Did you know that according to studies, it takes the average postpartum person around two years to recover from pregnancy?
During pregnancy, the abdominal and pelvic floor muscles are stretched paper-thin. Carrying a fetus, and the stress of vaginal delivery, puts increased weight and pressure on the pelvic floor. The bones of the pelvis move, the pelvis tilts and becomes, on average, around 2.5cm wider.
One study of 68 women conducted at the University of Michigan's School of Nursing concluded that "pelvic floor recovery can take longer than eight months to fully resolve." The study used MRI imaging to assess healing at 7 weeks postpartum and again at 8 months and found that while some factors like swelling improved by 8 months, pelvic floor weakness had not. Another study at the Salford University in England indicated that it takes the body at least 12 months to recover from childbirth.
A study in the Indian Journal of Surgery claims healing of the abdominal wall fascia by around 2 weeks postpartum is 20%; by the end of 1 month it is nearly 50% and after 1 year, it is around 90%.
100% of people at 35 weeks pregnant have an enlarged gap ( ) between their abdominal wall. This reduces to around 30% of people by 12 months postpartum.
Bounce-back culture is a by-product of white supremacy which forces Eurocentric A***n beauty upon all women. Born of a desire to separate white women aesthetically and segregate them socially from enslaved Black women known as "breeders", many cultures in the global North put immense pressure on postpartum people to look as though pregnancy, birth and motherhood never happened.
Jennifer Lincoln, an obstetrician in Oregon, US writes "Many new birthing parents feel that they have to do a lot to prove that their pregnancy didn’t change them or their bodies at all. This is an unattainable reality for many."
The bounce-back is a myth; there is no going back but we can keep moving forward. Recovery is a long game but you are deserving of the time.
Your aesthetics don't determine your athletics.
Audio from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Calorie counts are bu****it. It was a system developed in the 19th century by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater to calculate how much heat energy a food item generated to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. It was then used as a general rule of thumb to garner how individual bodies extracted energy from the the food they consumed. The problem is, people don't extract calories from food in the same way.
Research reveals that how many calories our bodies extract from food depends on which species we eat, how we prepare our food, which bacteria are in our gut and how much energy we use to digest different foods. Most calorie counts listed on food packages are inaccurate because they are based on a system of averages that ignores the complexity of human digestion.
To accurately calculate the total calories that someone gets out of a given food, you would have to take into account factors including whether that food is able to survive digestion (foods like corn travel through the digestive tract whole); how food preparation (e.g. boiling, baking or sautéing) changes its structure; how much energy the body uses to break down different kinds of food; and the extent to which the bacteria in the gut aids digestion.
Even if two people eat the same apple or piece of meat cooked the same way, they will not get the same number of calories out of it. No food is average. Every food is digested in its own way. This is why two people eating identical diets may not adapt identical ways.
People differ in nearly all traits, including unseen features, such as the size of the gut. European scientists in the early 20th century discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57cm longer on average than those of certain Polish populations. Because the final stages of nutrient absorption occur in the large intestine, a Russian eating the same amount of food as a Pole is likely to get more calories from it.
Recent research has shown that even the calories listed on food labels, which only consider the calories in undigested food, and do not take into account the affect of food preparation, gut bacteria and physical traits can still be off by as much as 20-30%.
Your body is not a machine, and its needs are subjective not objective.
"Never forget that faphobia and thin supremacy originated with the dual purpose of disciplining white women into adherence to bodily ideals and structurally punishing Black women for not fulfilling them." ~ Emily Egger
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