Why is anorexia so much deadlier than obesity?
In: Biology
The stresses that obesity puts your body under will accumulate over time and eventually result in disease and death whereas lack of food will kill you more immediately as you literally don’t have the energy to power your body
Obesity causes a number of health related issues like increase risk of heart attacks, but it won’t really kill you directly, anorexia will directly cause your death if it goes too far and is untreated.
How does anorexia compare with water fasting? 😊
Obesity doesn’t outright kill you but it does put a lot of normal processes in your body in a bad shape. It speeds up and promotes disease processes like metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease. These things won’t kill you overnight, they take years to decades to build up and in the same way are a slow march to death. You can slow or stop progression but you’re left with the damage you’ve accumulated but not reverse it.
That’s different in anorexia, or more often, starvation. Your body only has so many stores of particular components in your body. Electrolytes are particularly important because they have to be within very narrow levels, your blood has to be at a certain pH, you need to have particular essential vitamins and nutrients to make the building blocks that go in your body. Once you’re into starvation, low levels of these things in your body quickly cause things to go wrong. The biggest killer is low potassium, which messes the rhythm in your heart. This means your heart can no longer function properly and goes into an electrical rhythm that’s unstable, then later likely lethal. Refeeding syndrome is dangerous as well – when bringing these people back into normal function, feeding them can also cause disturbances in electrolytes which can quickly become lethal.
In one case you get too much sugar/fat/nutritions and you die slowly because over time your body cant work optimal any more in the other case you simply do not get enough nutritions and your body stops working fast.
Obesity causes slow death and most of the time it just amplifies the problems your body gets while aging. Anorexia kills you faster, but i dont think its more deadly.
The floor is closer than the ceiling.
Think about it, you may weigh like 150 lbs as an adult. How much of that weight can you lose before cellular processes and body chemistry and physics can’t continue? Well, if you lost all 150 lbs, you’d be gone. Less than that, there’s bone, which is pretty heavy, and you don’t or won’t want to be losing bone density due to starvation or extreme dieting. A cursory googling suggests you can lose around half your body weight before there’s just not enough of you to live. So 75 lbs of what? Brittle bones and *leather*? Your body metabolizing bone and organs trying to keep you alive? Your brain is mostly fat. At some point the damage is unrecoverable.
Now consider the upper limit. We don’t actually know what that is. Jon Minnoch made it up to 1,400 lbs. Didn’t kill him! And with the help of modern medicine, how much can a person get to before succumbing to complications due to obesity? I’m sure there’s some upper limit of how heavy a person can get, limited by metabolism, how much oxygen a person can supply through their lungs, how far a heart can pump through the mass and extremities, but I can’t find anything off the cuff.
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