Keep your sims looking the way you’ve created them to look with help from the Fitness Controls/weight mod!
350 CC Items! Time to celebrate! 🎉
Before we begin: Thank you! We’re celebrating 3 years and 350+ CC items. As a gift, supporters can get all our free CC at once here: ALL IN ONE DOWNLOAD
When creating sims, chances are that you’re spending a decent chunk of time focusing on your sim’s physical appearance, as it can tell us a lot about the character without saying a word. In addition to the vanilla game tools at your disposal, players can use CC presets, slider mods, and other custom content to help sculpt sims to look exactly how you envision them. Whether you’re creating your own special character or trying to replicate a real person in The Sims 4 how you choose to make your sim look is often a calculated choice, and it can be really frustrating when the game decides to mess that all up for you!
The Sims 4 has a nutrition & weight system that affects the way sims lose and gain weight and muscle, and it’s always running in the background. This means NPCs, Townies, and nonactive player Households will have their sims’ physiques change as time goes by, depending on the activities they’re doing. The problem with this system is that it’s not coded in a fully realistic way and because of that, your sims’ physique can change in an unpredictable and sometimes unwanted fashion.
The Weight & Muscle System of The Sims 4
In the world of The Sims 4, weight is affected by food consumption and cardio activity while muscle is affected by strength-building activities. It doesn’t sound that different from how it works in the real world, but there are a few key differences that can make managing your sim’s physique trickier.
Calories, Weight Loss, & Weight Gain
Most foods in The Sims 4 have calories, ranging from 50 calories per serving all the way up to 800 calories for one plate. Sims can counteract calorie gain by doing cardio exercises to burn them off. The issue with this system is twofold, however. First off only cardio exercise counts, meaning your sims won’t burn calories during other physical activities like walking, gardening, cleaning, roller or ice skating, etc. Basically, if the activity doesn’t affect your sim’s fitness skill it definitely isn’t going to help them burn calories.
The second problem is that sims who aren’t in the active household are far more likely to autonomously eat something than they are to do a cardio workout, so your NPCs and other characters who are around when you’re playing will passively be taking in calories more often than they’ll be burning them. Essentially the system is rigged to make it a lot easier for sims to gain weight than it is for them to maintain or lose weight without player intervention.
More on SNOOTYSIMS: Have you ever tried to mentor others in Sims 4 to help them achieve fitness goals? A fitness mentor is a great option for anyone who’d like to improve their athletic performance.
Muscle Gain & Loss
Muscle composition is affected separately from fat gain/loss, so your sims gain no muscle-building benefit from cardio activities (nor will they burn calories from doing strength training). If a sim does enough strength training activities they will gain muscle, and they will lose muscle over time if they don’t keep those activities up.
Sims will never lose muscle below what it was set at when they were first created so you can have a bodybuilder sim who will still look ripped even if they never lift a single weight. On the one hand, this will keep unplayed sims from wasting away but on the other hand, it’s not very accurate. Combine this with the wonky weight system and it’s easy to end up with a town full of overweight sims who also have washboard abs!
One last hitch with this system is that it’s designed to have fairly rapid effects so you can actually observe your sims changing; it’s great for short or medium lifespans but if you play with long lifespans or aging off you’ll have more time for your unplayed sims to drift from one end of the spectrum to the other.
Teen Metabolism
Teen sims have a special quirk when it comes to the weight loss/gain system. For some reason they gain weight half as fast as they lose it, so it’s more likely that sims will thin out as teenagers and grow up into smaller adults regardless of their fitness level. This is likely an attempt to simulate the growth spurts and larger body changes that are experienced during puberty but the way it’s integrated into the game, it sort of undoes whatever physique your sim has developed during their early lives.
For More Information
Carl’s Sim Guide made a great video about how these systems work in The Sims 4 if you’d like more information, including known calorie amounts for different in-game foods:
Making It Make Sense – The Fitness Controls\Weight Mod
If you’d like the weight and muscle system of The Sims 4 to behave more realistically, the Fitness Controls mod by roBurky is worth taking a look at. The mod consists of a suite of small changes that work together to make sims’ bodies behave in a more realistic and reliable way, preventing these drastic shifts that can catch players off guard.
Highlights of the Fitness Control weight mod:
- Speed up or slow down the rate at which sims gain/lose fat & muscle to better match your play style
- Disable physique changes to sims outside of the Active Household
- Change the max limits to what sims can gain/lose for fat & muscle, allowing for a more expanded range of body shapes
- Change Teens’ gain rates to match their loss rates so they don’t all end up underweight by Young Adulthood
- Disable the effects of the High Metabolism trait so bulky sims don’t shed weight & muscle as quickly
You can fine-tune the options for this mod but it’s also designed to start working as soon as you install it, immediately disabling Townie weight & muscle changes and Teen metabolism tweaks. So even if you don’t want to take full control of your sims’ physique changes, this will at least prevent NPCs and Teens from having rapidly shifting body compositions outside of your control.
Known Limits/Issues
Fortunately, there aren’t many issues related to this mod, and the ones that are there are purely cosmetic.
When pushing the limits of fat or muscle in CAS, your sim’s body will stop growing/shrinking past a certain adjustment point. All you have to do is change an item of clothing they have on which will update their body and reflect the new slider value (you can change the clothing back right afterward). Essentially you just need to “refresh” the sim for their new body shape to show up.
CC clothing won’t always cooperate with sims on the thicker end of things and you may notice some arm clipping into clothing. There’s no known way to alleviate this right now, but sims won’t suffer any adverse effects from it and might just look odd in some poses or situations.
Closing Thoughts
Understanding how the muscle & fat systems of The Sims 4 work is only part of the battle, and with roBurky’s mod, you have even more tools to handle the way the game behaves. Keep your sims in good shape or at the very least, make those body changes more sensible as your characters navigate their way through life so you aren’t suddenly surprised by a wave of overweight or buff neighbors everywhere they go! Have you ever noticed your sims’ bodies changing after a long time playing? Will you use this mod? Let us know in the comments and happy simming!