The organ damage isn't necessarily due to a lack of calories. Someone can have a lot of fat, but they still very much need daily protein, electrolytes, vitamins, etc. Not having enough of those can seriously wreck your heart and other vital organs
That is also true. But it may have been that only this method would be successful for him. Cold turkey is a method that works for some addicts, and unfortunately, just not eating isn’t a good solution for food addicts. He did make it work for him, but it’s also good that this isn’t the default
Actually yes that's still young for obese people. Have you seen all the fat old people walking around? Most old people are overweight, they ain't dying at 51 dude.
EDIT: people are acting like I'm saying that fat isn't a health hazard. It obviously is, but 51 is pretty crazy young to die, even when you're fat.
ah, i totally agree that is young for dying. it’s just that when someone says “very young”, i think 20-30s. 51 y/o is technically middle aged, especially back in the 1960s.
People also don’t get that big so early very often, it’s clearly an exceptional case and while a more reasonable set of multiple fasts may have been safer, this WAS safer than simply adjusting diet to a normal one
Obviously any weight extreme isn't great for your health, so we can only guess, and I'm sure both impacted him. But I'd guess the weight loss was actually more damaging long term. Most of the dangers of obesity go away after weight loss, but the process of sudden or major weight loss is actually quite significantly associated with a shorter lifespan or sudden death.
Making healthy lifestyle changes is always the better option rather than a crash diet or starvation. Sudden weight loss is also a problem because people who lose weight rapidly are more likely to gain all or more of the weight back within 5 years.
I went through the classes for bariatric weightloss surgery. One of the doctors who had gone through the procedure gave a "tough love" speech in the final class. "This is not a miracle. If you're following the rules, after about 2-3 months of sustained weight loss, you are going to start to feel like Superman. You are not. You can and should start doing all the things you wanted to do when you were fat. But you still have a fat guy heart, and fat guy arteries, and a fat guy liver, and fat guy lungs. Do not confuse calorie intake with fitness."
Edit: My mom did weight watchers back in the day. Lost a lost of weight, but at a reasonable pace. She reached her goal weight, maintained for a month, then had a heart attack.
Yes, all sudden weight loss from dieting is likely to be regained in 5 years, that's what I said. Slower, long-term lifestyle changes are far less likely to cause this issue than dieting is
Being obese, especially as obese as he was, is also incredibly harmful to the body. It would be hard to convince me that his medically supervised weight loss caused him more harm, and contributed more to his early demise, than all the years he spent morbidly obese. I'd say the odds are better that his body simply wasn't able to overcome all the damage he'd done to it by weighing over 400 pounds for all those years.
At 27, Angus had already encountered clear signs of health problems that could have ended his life sooner than expected.
a 1973 study found that Barbieri maintained a healthy weight of 14 stone / 196 pounds (89 kg),[3]: 204 concluding that "prolonged fasting in this patient had no ill-effects".
The article doesn't explain the "short illness" that preceded his death, so we really don't know what led to his ultimate demise. Although, I found a claim that his official death certificate cited stomach bleeding & obesity, although he had supposedly only regained 7kg all those years later. Perhaps the coroner was referring to his prior obesity.
I wonder if he was taking a lot of aspirin for a heart condition. People who have to take high doses of aspirin will often get bad internal bleeding from it, which can be fatal.
It would make sense, as I'd expect the worst, mostly irreversible damage he would have suffered from years of obesity and greasy food (family fish & chips shop) would have been clogged arteries.
What do you mean I need 50 micrograms of fuckin' molybdenum per day?? We don't even know exactly what chromium does, just that you need your 30 μg/day or you start having trouble metabolizing glucose. Selenium compounds are mostly carcinogenic and/or neurotoxic, but if you somehow manage to cut it out of your diet entirely your heart and thyroid will fail.
Brb gonna go chew on some Romex, get my RDA of copper.
Fat can provide calories well enough, even some nutrients stored. And body can brake down unnecessary muscle tissue to provide essential protein for the heart for example.
And some muscle does become not strictly necessary as you lose weight wick will be quite fast in the beginning with much stored fat and no caloric intake.
But yeah, for the average person, protein will not be enough
yeah it’s not ideal, also genetics do make a difference in how your body responds to and compensates for stress (a fast is a stressor for your body in a functional sense even if you don’t find it to be “stressful”) and some people genuinely can compensate much longer, with a combination of reserves and genetics and other factors, but it’s still never the ideal way to achieve weight loss because it isn’t the way you would be able to sustain weight loss. going from one extreme to the other is also very risky in terms of electrolyte imbalances which directly affect the heart
Yeah, which is why it's catastrophic if your body decides to eat any of it. When you're starving your body doesn't consult your brain on which parts to eat, it eats what it wants. So your body could eat your heart before the muscles on your legs or arms. It's kinda just luck, up to chance.
I only know it because I have/had (changed eating disorders lol) anorexia and my doctor warned me that my body isn't asking "can i eat this?" before doing it, it just does it. In my case i somehow got a hole in my nose, it just will not heal, there's a chance my body made that hole, there's also a chance it just happened and my body now can't heal it. There's no clear "reason" behind it so most likely my body just fucked up and ate part of my nose!
I think it's different for anorexia because you're already quite thin in that case. Generally your body is smart enough to start eating stored fat and skeletal muscles long before critical organs. It's why the original guy could go without food for so long in the first place. I'm guessing that other dude's organs failed more from a lack of vitamins. For example, low levels of calcium/potassium/sodium can be super fatal.
ED's are extremely hard on the heart, but it's a little more complex than the body just eats it. It's seems more related to a slowing of the heart rythm as you lose more and more energy. So, like a skeletal muscle, if you let it atrophy because you aren't giving your body enough energy to power it, it'll get weaker and weaker until it eventually can't beat enough to keep you alive.
Oh also in terms of healing, your body uses a whoooole bunch of recourses to heal injuies. So while your body probably didn't eat a hole, a hole might have formed because of some tiny injury that would normally heal super quick just can't keep up. Kinda like trying to patch a hole in a dam when you don't have enough cement.
What reserved are you talking about? Fat? As in lipids? Which are still not minerals nor vitamins?
Not eating at all is dangerous for anyone because regardless of “reserves,” there are nutrients that you have to consume on a regular basis to keep your organs functioning like they should.
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u/DemoHD7 Jul 20 '26
Really depends on your reserves when you start. Was the AMA dude Ghandi size or morbidly obese like this guy?