I'm so confused why people are posting this. I agree fasting is viable until you run out of fat reserves (that's what this study is showing).
My point was that the type of food your calories consist of does matter. If you do nothing but drink olive oil and multivitamins, you will lose a lot of weight and eventually starve to death, no matter how many calories you consume. The point is that the type of food you eat does matter to weight gain/loss (not only the calorie count), because the type of food affects how many of those calories you actually retain.
As far as I can see, this study provides no evidence (nor attempts to) that a diet consisting of nothing but olive oil can sustain your weight. I think it's quite well accepted that different kinds of food will be retained to differing degrees in your body (or put another way, different types of food will end up being passed through your system in differing percentages -- as well as with differing degrees of nutritional satisfaction per calorie ingested).
Human fat is substantially more complex than olive oil. Also he survived on more than his fat. He also survived on his skin, some muscle tissue, organ tissues, etc. Research shows increased autophagy during fasts like the one described at your link. During a fast whole organ systems shrink as old senescent cells are destroyed and their nutrients recycled.
The oddest thing about reading the comments here is that people are dismissing the words of someone who has spent the better part of a decade in formal education in medicine, and a large part of his professional career focusing on weight management.
The subject in that study lost 276 pounds over the year! If anything, doesn't that confirm what I'm claiming?
I'm not sure how you think this corroborates your claim that you can sustain your weight by drinking olive oil and water (+ multivitamin). In fact, I don't see anything remotely relevant to this in the study.
I think we're misunderstanding each other. What I don't get is where you're getting the evidence for this claim:
> If he were to eat that well calculated amount of olive oil everyday his weight would stay constant.
A source for this is needed. The study you provided, as far as I can see, says nothing of this. You're just assuming it's true, and I don't understand how/why.
That a gram of fat is roughly 9 calories? You seem to believe that at some amount of regular ingestion it will start getting processed differently? I'm not sure what kind of a paper you'd like, I don't think anyone will come up with specifically olive oil.
As per your other reply to the same link
differing degrees of nutritional satisfaction per calorie ingested
Yes it's commonly thought to work that way, there are indeed differences - but they're tiny. I might try to dig up relevant papers, but as far as my memory goes, the difference was at best around 3% with certain kind of protein.
Wow! Interesting paper. It appears to be saying that he went over a year without any "essential" amino acid intake. I would not have thought that possible.
> If I eat 500 calories surplus a day, i'll gain ~1 pound a week.
Not if you expel an excess 500 calories per day on the toilet. This is what would happen if you chug a glass of olive oil, for example -- your body won't digest it all, and the vast majority of it will pass straight through.
This is an extreme example, but I make it to demonstrate a point 'calorie couters' always seem to forget: You keep assuming that you retain 100% of the calories you ingest, minus what you burn. This is demonstrably incorrect.
Like, "calorie count is the primary determinant of weight gain, given nearly all typical human eating habits"?
Or "calorie count is the primary determinant of weight gain assuming you don't deliberately bypass your digestive system (likely inflicting discomfort and/or harm on yourself in the process) by consuming diuretics or indigestible food combinations"?
Even in both of those cases, it seems like the general point is still pretty much intact.
You're claiming that a human can viably survive their whole life by consuming a daily diet of:
This seems extremely far-fetched. Do you have a source for this claim?