My friend has been starving himself and vomiting up his food consistently for the past 2 years i’d say, he’s about 65kg whilst being around 6’1, i try to tell him that it’s bad for your health and that sooner or later he’ll just put the weight back on again anyway, but he hasn’t, he’s stayed being relatively skinny and there has been no changes in his behaviour or personality in fact i’d say he’s much happier than he’s ever been.
In: Biology
In the long term, he will gain weight. Humans that starve make their bodies way more efficient at keeping calories (which means it’s easier to gain weight).
The body will adapt to try and survive in case of starvation.
Your friend is doing damage to his body. He has bulimia and anorexia.
Sure, it’s a good way to “loose weight” but it’s also a great way to cause damage to his organs due to lacking vital nutrients. It’s a great way to lose teeth and get mouth and esophagus cancer because of the constant damage from stomach acid.
Calories cause you to retain and gain fat. Nutrients maintain your health by giving your body building materials to replace dead cells.
This is why 1200 calories is considered the MINIMUM people should eat… Any less and you aren’t really able to get the nutrients you need in so little food.
Your friend sounds like he has an eating disorder (bulemia perhaps) but also maybe has some body dysmorphia. At 6’1” 65kg (143 lbs) his BMI is 18.9 which is the very low end of healthy weight. Why is he trying to lose weight in the first place? See if you can get him to seek help.
Starving yourself (excessively) is not ineffective in losing weight, but it comes with a number of detriments. For one, your health is at risk of suffering due to the diminished consumption nutrients. But more importantly, the damage that it can do to your heart and bones is also something to be concerned about. When you’re excessively diminished when it comes to your nutrition and energy intake, your body is more prone to look to other internal sources of energy to sustain itself, and it won’t be all fat. Your body is liable to sap from your lean mass, which includes organs like your heart, weakening it over time and possibly causing irreparable damage.
Your friend sounds like he could be suffering from bulimia if he’s purging food that he eats. Purging damages your throat due to the spasming and gastric acid, and it also causes damage to your heart when done in excess. If he hasn’t already, he should seek help from professionals as there usually other issues going on behind the scene, like body dysmorphia and possibly even depression. I’m by no means a professional, but what your friend is doing is extreme and harmful, and this goes beyond the risk of just gaining weight back.
Starving yourself causes your body to go into survival mode and this causes a huge amount of stress and can permanently alter your genetics. Starving yourself via throwing up the food you have eaten is called bulimia nervosa and it is considered to be a very serious mental health disorder. Constantly vomiting can cause serious damage to your esophagus (the tube that takes food from your mouth to your stomach) and will cause permanent damage to your teeth as the acids etch away the irreplaceable enamel layer. Not actually digesting the food you have consumed can lead to all sorts of nutritional deficiencies which can cause some pretty major side effects as well – e.g. nerve damage, organ failure, loss of mental function and so on.
Starving yourself also has the side effect of causing your metabolism to slow down which means that your friend is at a high risk of quickly becoming obese if he resumes eating food normally without help from a physician to guide him. Under the guidance he should be limiting his caloric intake and combining it with exercise to build up some muscle mass to help improve his metabolism and reach and maintain a safe healthy weight over time.
Being skinny does not mean that you are healthy either. One of my older brothers is fairly skinny but he is really unhealthy and will likely be the first of us 5 brothers to pass away because of this – his skinniness is due to a terrible diet combined with smoking (he mainly exists on corn chips and soft drinks and refuses to eat any fruits or vegetables). What makes that worse is that my youngest brother is extremely obese and my eldest brother is not far off being a full blown alcoholic which should make either of them be the ones at the most risk of being the first to pass.
Your friend has an eating disorder by the sound of it.
Anorexia/bulimia is bad because your body doesn’t just eat fat, it eats your muscles, too. That’s not a healthy way to lose weight. It sounds like your friend suffers from a bit of both. Usually anorexics just starve themselves, while bulimics will often binge eat, and then throw it all up. It kind of sounds like your friend is doing a combination of the two.
Do some google image searches on people with these illnesses and you’ll quickly see why it’s ‘bad.’
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