Why is anorexia so much deadlier than obesity?
In: Biology
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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