It used to be a practice to treat obesity with total abstinence from food. Throughout the 20th century and predominantly during the 60s, there have been many clinical studies documenting experiments where subjects would be put on water fasting, often for very long periods of time - hundreds of days. I suspect it would seem like an eternity for the faster.
Some of these fasts have been successful; however, quite a few lead to death. I've been reading a lot of scientific literature on fasting and obesity and in this post I'm bringing awareness to a paper from 1966 titled Treatment of obesity by total fasting for up to 249 days.
Here are a few highlights from the paper:
- 13 obese patients (3 males, 10 females), age 17 to 71, weight 158 to 286 lbs. were treated in hospital; thus, they were under observation
- many suffered from multiple diseases, aside of obesity
- the periods of starvation lasted between 25 to 249 days
- water, black coffee, unsweetened tea and acaloric beverages were permitted
- they were given daily multivitamin pills
- their ketone levels were measured daily
- all patients lost weight.
Weight-loss was between 8 and 97 lbs and 10 out of the 13 patients had no side-effects from total fasting, while 3 experienced edema, hypotension, and parotitis (inflammation of the parotid glands.
Various objective and subjective biomarkers have been measured throughout the patients' fasts. But I prefer not getting too technical today (taking a short mental break).
If you're interested, please find the link to the study below. And if you read it and you'd really like to get technical, we can extend the discussion in the comments section.
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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author