Currently on a diet. I have no idea how this weird question even got into my mind, but here we go.
In: Biology
Even a normal sized person can survive for months and months on only water. The body is Amazing. The fat stores do exactly what they are supposed to do… and your body is extremely efficient.
A morbidly obese person could possibly survive a year on water alone I would imagine.
Of course, level of activity would be a gigantic variable…. But assuming this person is like 400 or 500 lbs… It would take a very long time to burn through 400 pounds worth the fat.
A pound of fat is 3500 calories… If you are burning 1500 calories a day…. You can survive a super long time.
Im sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. You would probably be sleeping a lot and malnutrished… but you would live.
Self report of things they ate are usually inaccurate. So called heroic acts that are self reported to loose weight should be judged accordingly. People with witness hugger strikes had issues with waste elimination resulting in blindness and other issues because of vitamin deficiency. Modified hunger strikes with vitamins and enemas and other things had fewer long term harm. The Irish hunger strikes are a good resource if you are interested in less biased information.
Yeah this isn’t that uncommon actually, in certain cases when a person with obesity needs to go for surgery and they weigh too much for the surgeon to be certain the surgery will work they’ll go in hospital for a period and do what’s called a milk diet. Essentially they get about 600 calories a day of milk along with vitamins and micronutrients and as much water and black tea as they want. It’s to kick start weight loss and get them into a better weight range for a successful surgery.
There was a season of the show Alone, where dozen or so survivalists get dropped in the wilderness and have to survive — the last one to tag out wins. While he didn’t win, in the season I watched there was an obese guy who literally said he was expecting his fat to get him a long way toward victory because he didn’t have to rely on hunting nearly as much as the other contestants. And he was right. At one point in the show he said he thought he’d probably lost about 75lb — for the first couple of weeks he wasn’t even trying to hunt!
This is a viable weight loss method for morbidly obese people. There was a study done where a man lost 376 pounds in 17 months on a diet of specific supplements, amino acids, and yeast extract to fight hunger. The key to that man’s success was constant supervision by medical professionals. I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
Your body fat isn’t sufficient to sustain life. There are a variety of essential vitamins and minerals that your body needs to live and fat doesn’t contain them. An obese person would die in about the same amount of time as anyone else without the other essentials.
You wouldn’t be able to do it on just water. You wouldn’t starve, but you’d die from other deficiencies. You might be able to on some sort of supervised regimen of supplements. I do think in a few extreme cases of My 600 Pound lLife a patient was in the hospital on basically an IV drop.
I would not recommend trying it yourself. Those people were not only consuming water, and they were all far beyond morbidly obese. And most of the people in the show never got to that point. It was only for the extreme minority of an extreme minority. It’s a very extreme option and I highly doubt the average morbidly obese person (far less than 600 pounds) would benefit from it compared to a low calorie diet that involves food. I also doubt you could just figure out which vitamins you needed on your own and grab them from Walgreens. You’d need a doctor to ok this and prescribe or list what supplements you need.
My very fat friend did this (enormous dude, like 6’5″ 500 pounds). He went to a doctor who had him do this, he lost an insane amount of weight (I want to say 200+ lbs).
He gained a lot of it back when starting to eat again because of his bad diet.
Controversial opinion here, but there are so many problems with fasting— our latest health trend. One big issue is that it forces a huge detox on your liver, and our livers aren’t prepared or willing to do that so fast. And so it puts immense pressure on your liver. This is from the Medical Medium regarding fasts:
“An inappropriate fast forces your liver to release too many toxins at once. When the toxins flood the bloodstream, the kidneys and bowel can still only eliminate a small portion at a time. The rest floats around in the bloodstream.
This sudden barrage of poison in the bloodstream causes two kinds of problems. First, the toxins can wreak havoc on your pancreas, spleen, nervous system, brain and heart. Second, the spillover puts your liver in a state of alarm, so the organ works on overdrive trying to gather up and seal in the toxins once more. It’s exhausting to your liver, which makes it harder for it to heal later and potentially more reluctant to release toxins in the future….”
But if you’re a rare rare rare person that has not taken in toxins in your life (basically almost impossible without substantial efforts), then maybe it can be okay. But anyone with the standard American diet… fat chance lol.
Detoxes can be done safely but you have to do it in a slow structured way that your liver can then prepare for. Look up the 3:6:9 fast with Medical medium if interested.
The other big problem I have heard him say is it will jack up your adrenaline. And when you do that, it’s corrosive to the body and will deplete your energy. You will age very fast among other issues.
I might have come away from your main question here but I thought this could be of interest to someone out there!
No. Starving yourself triggers your body’s survival mechanism forcing it to hold on to fat. You’ll just be fat and unable to do anything that requires energy.
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