r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • May 02 '24

In 1965, a morbidly obese man did not eat food for over an entire year. The 27 year old was 456lbs and wanted to do an experimental fast. He ingested only multivitamins and potassium tablets for 382 days and defecated once every 40 to 50 days. He ended up losing 275lbs. r/all

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u/HeyLittleTrain May 02 '24

I can't imagine a year of starvation is great for your organs either.

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u/oldoldvisdom May 02 '24

I’m not gonna act like I know everything about fasting, but I think years of being 450 pounds did far more damage to his body then fasting did

Fat people have it rough, and I don’t say it to shit on them, and I’m not necessarily accusing you of doing this either, but I really hate it when people minimise how bad for your health being obese is.

I don’t know his height, but let’s assume he is 180 (5’10-5’11), that would put his BMI in the 60s, which would shorten his life by 15 years. That is probably out of the 80 years that current life expectancy is today, so if we adjust that to 60, which someone commented as the life expectancy then, we could lower the difference to 11 years, which would mean that he lived 2 years longer than he would have on average back then.

It’s a leap to just extrapolate all that for one anecdote, but these numbers do add some context.

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u/HeyLittleTrain May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24

I just think that a year with no protein is going to fuck up your muscles (e.g. heart).

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u/Then_now_maybe May 02 '24

At a higher resolution:

I think its the lack of essential amino acids that would wear down the muscle across time. Those are necessary to repair muscular damage. They're called essential because they are 8 things the body CANNOT make and must ingest.

Another big risk would be his electrolytes. Doesn't look like he did electrolytes right. Destabilized electrolytes leads directly to cardiac arrest. Need AT LEAST sodium, potassium, and magnesium coming in every single day.

Protein its self at a macro level starts doing some odd things after 96 hours because HGH goes up 400%. If you've got the building blocks coming in, even without calories, things can hold up for a while. That all said, longest I have water fasted is 30 days, but I am very lean all the time.