Food is the spice of life, and this wouldn’t be the best life simulator out there if it didn’t have a comprehensive nutrition system! The Sims 4 has a very detailed recreation of food and how it interacts with weight, fat and muscle gain. In fact, this simulation is so intricate that many players end up confused by it! Don’t panic though, we’re here to walk you through The Sims 4 weight system and a great mod that makes it work even better.
The Sims Nutrition Basics
Food in The Sims works like food in the real world. Each dish has an amount of calories associated with it based on its ingredients and method of preparation, starting at around 50 for healthy light dishes like salads and going up to a whooping 800 for certain gourmet treats. The maths used by the game here is that for every 150 calories, your Sims will gain 1 pound. Sounds simple enough, right? It’s at the burning of calories that things get complex.
In real life, calories are burned throughout the day to make energy that the body uses for its functions while the excess of it is stored. You burn calories when running a marathon, but you also use them by playing a game of chess or even while sleeping! Activities that put certain muscles to work will help build muscle mass on top of the calorie burn.
The complex thing about The Sims is that it breaks nutrition, exercise and muscle gain into three different things that don’t always match their real life counterpart. When Sims eat, they gain weight. However, normal activities don’t have any effect on weight loss or calorie gain, so even if you send our hero to walk a million laps around their home, it won’t matter!
The only activities that help balance out the weight gain from food intake are cardio ones, which work by gradually chipping away at a Sims’ body fat. Muscles on the other hand are built by using machines, but with a catch – you won’t burn any calories doing that! Doing muscle workouts is still important because if you don’t, your Sims muscle mass will begin dropping until it reaches a minimum.
Balancing Out Your Sims Weight
In practice, you need to follow a relatively strict routine to keep your Sims body within the same brackets. For starters you must choose a diet that fits their pocket and schedule. The latter is important because to maintain your Sims’ shape you will need time to give them enough cardio exercise to compensate for what they’ve eaten. Past that, you also must give them muscle workouts to make sure their muscle mass doesn’t decay over time.
Does this fast pace sound like a proper headache? Well, it kind of is! Don’t worry though, this The Sims 4 Weight Mod allows you to make things simpler and more realistic.
The Sims 4 Weight Mod
We recommend using this mod to make your experience with your Sims’ body types more enjoyable. The way the game is made means there is no The Sims 4 weight mod per se short of editing the sliders, but this will make controlling it at will a lot easier.
Fitness Controls, by roBurky
The Fitness Controls mod is not a single change, but rather a pack of changes that drastically improve the food, weight and muscle interactions. It adds a new settings menu accessible any time in game where you can:
- Control the fat and muscle rate of change
- Freeze current fat and muscle levels for non-active households
- Change the muscle and fat limits
- Stop teens from becoming underweight
- Remove the slower fat and muscle decrease ration from Sims with the High Metabolism trait
The net result of this is a more relaxing and less chaotic household experience, leaving you more time for activities and plans you enjoy instead of counting calories all day long.
This mod can be found at Mod The Sims, along with an in-depth explanation for each of its features.
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