1. My sister has always been overweight, but she recently had gallbladder surgery and she has lost a lot of weight in the four months after. I think she secretly had bariatric surgery. It is not possible to lose weight rapidly without weight loss surgery.
It is absolutely possible to lose an enormous amount of weight when going through a stressful health crisis. Surgeries, illnesses and accidents can all cause a rapid deterioration of muscle mass particularly in people with metabolic issues. In fact, people with diabetes are at an exceptionally high risk of damaging their liver/kidneys from rapid lean muscle mass loss during and after a serious illness.
This is caused by the exaggerated adrenal stress response that metabolically compromised people experience and which I have discussed before. Diabetics can break down everything on their bodies, extremely quickly, except their fat mass. The fat mass is always spared. It is this sparing that causes the rapid loss of everything else.
This would make it seem like the person has lost "weight" but in reality, the weight they lost was mostly lean muscle mass. This is why it becomes so obvious to the onlooker as the person might appear gaunt in the upper body and extremities but still have a large amount of soft fat covering their body.
This rapid "weight loss" is not good. Loss of muscle mass worsens the outcomes of recovering from serious illnesses, and it negatively effects overweight/obesity in the future. After all, if you lose a lot of muscle while fat mass is mostly spared, you are now fatter by volume than you were before, no matter how "thin" you may look or what the scale says.
Nutrition is vitally important during this time, especially adequate protein. Unfortunately, a desire to eat protein is usually lost when appetite reduces and people tend to seek novelties in order to stimulate their appetite, worsening the problem. Protein supplementation should be discussed with a healthcare professional for this issue.
2. Fat people always lie. They lie about "why" they are fat. They never blame themselves. It's always some "stress" or illness. My mother ballooned up to 225 lbs. and says it was "because of COVID".
There are a lot of fat people who are in denial and often "lie" about why they are fat but the vast majority of them simply don't know. They don't associate their behaviors, particularly their food choices, to being fat because they have been on countless "diets" and seen little to no results. This makes them start doubting that their condition could be related to food and they are correct for the most part.
Because of this it's easy for quacks online to tell them it's "stress" or parasites or viruses. Most of these quacks aren't misinforming them on purpose. They also can't figure out what it is because they don't understand obesity any more than their obese patients do.
Your mother didn't reach 225 lbs. "because of COVID". Putting on that much weight does not occur overnight. I am sure she wasn't slim and trim before getting sick. She reached that weight due to blood glucose dysregulation. This is mostly the result of lifestyle, which diet and exercise are a large part of. Of course, it would be very difficult to explain this to her as she most likely doesn't want to give up her diet or she believes she never "ate enough" to make her 225 lbs. After all, if it's all about calories, she would assume she had to eat an enormous number of pancakes to make that big of a difference in her weight. Of course, we know that's not true. It only takes one pancake, believe it or not, as carbohydrates profoundly incline metabolism towards obesity, even at low calories, through their effect on blood glucose regulation. One pancake is enough to disrupt blood glucose.
COVID doesn't make you fat. It makes you sick. An illness like COVID, which effects your respiratory system and gives you flu like symptoms, tends to make you not want to eat, as food loses its appeal when you're coughing, running a fever, can't breathe and may even lose your sense of smell and taste.
Of course, this doesn't mean that illnesses or injuries cannot contribute to weight gain. If I break my leg and can only sit in front of the TV for the next six months, while taking solace eating cookies all day, then I can say the broken leg contributed to my weight gain. But it only made a contribution, it wasn't the direct cause. You don't gain weight from unfortunate circumstances. You gain weight from blood glucose dysregulation due to sitting around all day while eating cookies, broken leg or not. Cookies disrupt your blood glucose regulation. Certain inflammatory conditions which require prescribed steroids will also interfere with blood glucose regulation. But these things can be circumvented to prevent or minimize their effects.
For those who already have blood glucose dysregulation, they will only experience more of it after COVID as illnesses cause a prolonged and exaggerated stress response in them. So in that sense, you can say COVID contributes to further dysregulation of blood glucose which will cause more weight gain but it doesn't work alone. There had to have already been an issue with metabolism to begin with.
Overweight/obesity are lifestyle choices and, aside from diet and exercise, one of those choices is victim hood. If you are a victim of unfortunate circumstances and this is why you are overweight/obese, then there is nothing you can do about it. You will continue being helplessly overweight/obese while making absolutely zero efforts to change it. There are a lot of overweight/obese people who take this approach. They address everything except what's causing their overweight/obesity.
3. If you aren't counting calories and skip a meal, then that equates to less calories. That's what's really achieving any benefits.
This premise has been debated a million times over and the beliefs surrounding it are always incomplete or incorrect. There are a couple of assumptions being made here:
- Assumption One - Skipping a meal equates to less calories. That's not necessarily true. A person can eat an enormous number of calories in just one meal, depending on what the meal consists of. So, skipping a meal doesn't always equate to "less calories". It depends on what the meals being eaten are and what the meal being skipped was. Then the person has to accurately track their calories in order to know exactly how much they are consuming and how much they aren't. People are notoriously imprecise doing this. But you know what they are even more imprecise at? Calculating how many calories they burn.
- Assumption Two - Eating less calories, is what's achieving results. That's also not true. Again, it depends on what exactly is being eaten and what's being defined as "results". All short term weight loss and gain is mitigated through calories. If stepping on the scale and being ten pounds lighter is considered "results", then you can easily achieve that with calories. If the results you need are to get 50 lbs.+ off, then calories won't affect your metabolism profoundly enough to get the job done.
To expand on this question further, what's ultimately being debated here is whether fasting is the same as calorie restriction and the answer to that is yes and no. Like I mentioned above, fasting very well can result in a reduction of overall caloric intake but that's not where the benefits are coming from. If it was, then caloric restriction would achieve the same results but it doesn't. Why?
Because there is a big difference in restricting calories at "mealtimes" and restricting them "overall". The body doesn't respond the same way to these two forms of "calorie restriction". Calorie restriction at mealtimes results in increased hunger because the person couldn't eat to satiety and had to leave the table hungry. After all, they have to purposely refrain from eating because they can go over their calorie budget. The body reacts to this practice, if done chronically, by going into "starvation mode". It simply believes there isn't enough food available and for that reason, it must conserve energy and spare fat mass. Soon, all of the calorie restricted food that's eaten, will be stored as fat and no body fat will be burned. That's basically what "starvation mode" is - An under expression of leptin so the body doesn't burn its body fat. This ancient mechanism prevents starvation.
But if the person practices no caloric restriction during mealtimes and simply eats to satiety, without leaving the table hungry, the body will not react to a missed meal. This is why it is much easier for someone to drop one meal and keep two, than it is for them to eat three "small" calorie restricted meals. Dropping one meal does not signal to the body that there isn't enough food available. It simply signals to it that it must wait for its next meal.
Starvation mode is the Achilles heel of dieting and why all diets fail. You should practice eating habits that prevent this mechanism from kicking in before it's suppose to. The only time this mechanism should kick in, is when body fat drops to a critical point. Not before. If it does it before, you remain fat.
4. A person who only eats 500 calories a day will lose weight.
They will lose the typical water weight, everyone loses at first, and then the body fights back. It does this through increased hunger, reduction in energy expenditure from metabolic slow down, catabolism of lean muscle mass through an increased adrenal stress response and an under expression of leptin to stop any burning of body fat. The body will continue this trajectory until one of two things occur:
- #1 - The person gives up because they feel so unwell. They resume eating normally and they start feeling better, but their body insists that starvation is right around the corner, so it purposely stores all of their food as fat and continues to limit metabolic output. The person now easily becomes fatter than they were before while not increasing food intake.
- #2 - The person continues on 500 calories a day and ignores everything that's happening to them. This usually can only occur in a controlled situation like a prison camp or during famine but can also be seen in certain eating disorders. The person continues to burn through their lean muscle mass. The person can become a human skeleton but continue living. It is very difficult to starve to death as long as some food is coming in. This is because the body has extremely efficient, fail-safe mechanisms to prevent starvation. It will continue eating itself, down to the bones, if need be, in order to preserve the little fat that's left. If the person wavers from this, the same thing that happened to the person in scenario #1, will happen to them upon eating again.
Chronic calorie restriction adapts the body to becoming fatter. It will become fatter faster, better and become even more resistant to leanness than it was before the restriction. This is why calorie restriction is a terrible, unhealthy way of addressing obesity.
5. You can have "as much insulin as you like" and not gain weight, if you aren't eating excess calories.
The premise of this statement is incorrect. Insulin doesn't cause "weight gain". It is not an "obesity hormone". It causes for either primarily muscle to grow or primarily fat to grow. It's an anabolic hormone. It makes things grow. It is also anticatabolic but that's another discussion. Let's just concentrate on insulin's anabolic properties for the time being as that's the context of the statement.
If your insulin is being directed to build muscle, you will technically gain weight as muscle is very heavy. This is why some body builders inject insulin. They aren't worried about "having too much insulin". After all, the insulin is causing their muscle mass to grow. Of course, they take other things besides insulin to redirect insulin's action to their muscle mass and suppress it from taking action on their fat mass, but you get the gist.
If your insulin is being directed to build fat mass, then you will also gain weight, but it won't seem to be much since fat is not as heavy as muscle. If you were to inject the same insulin as a body builder, you will get even fatter.
As you can see, it doesn't much matter how much insulin there is. The only thing that matters is what it's doing. Insulin is always building something. Muscle or fat. Leanness or obesity.
What this statement assumes is that you can have high insulin and not gain body fat because you aren't eating excess calories. That is semi-correct. You can have high insulin and not gain body fat, irrespective of calories, excess or not. Remember, this isn't about having "high insulin" or "excess calories". It's about insulin expression. What is insulin primarily acting on in your body? You can be eating an excess of calories and your insulin could be building muscle with it. You can be eating a deficit of calories and your insulin could be building fat mass with it.
Insulin is sort of like a traffic director. It tells calories where to go and what to do in your body, regardless of amount. It doesn't care if it's Sunday morning or rush hour. The cars (calories) will all be directed to do the same thing depending on your insulin expression which is determined by your neuroendocrine state.
6. Fasting is an ancient practice that has become popular again today. It should have always remained popular.
Fasting is an ancient practice that is still practiced today but usually in religious observations and customs. It was once thought to work as a weight loss method but failed miserably. This is why it lost popularity, quite quickly and became taboo.
The reason that it became taboo is because of its long-term negative effects on metabolism, when it's not practiced correctly. Basically, it can cause intractable obesity through chronic leptin under expression (starvation mode). This is the same thing that occurs with chronic calorie restriction. In fact, fasting became popular for weight loss when calories gained popularity for weight loss. Funny how calorie restriction is still practiced and condoned while fasting became taboo, even though they both cause the same metabolic dysfunction.
The only difference between the two seems to be that fasting causes this metabolic dysfunction quicker than calorie restriction as most people cannot sustain calorie restriction for long but they can surprisingly stretch fasting for longer and longer periods of time. This is most likely due to the body's ability to adapt quickly to the starvation mode caused from fasting than it does from calorie restriction. After all, calorie restriction still has some food coming in but fasting rapidly convinces the body it is starving for real.
So, that's why fasting fell from grace and didn't catch on. Of course, now it has made a comeback and all of those people practicing it, will eventually come to the same realization that all of the people who came before them did. By then though, it will be too late.