i lost 3/4 of a pound per day for 6 weeks

Question

if during one leg of my coma marathon (feb-march 2020) I was bedridden (so not burning calories exercising) and well hydrated, calorie/nutritional intake was maybe 4-8 hundred/day in nutritional supplement shakes, how many extra cells (beyond the usual 300 million) had to die per day for this to happen? (from two hundred lbs. to one hundred and sixty something lbs. in about 6 weeks)

obviously a nice chunk of them were brain cells since i cant do a plug n chug equation on my own anymore lmfao! sigh

thank you

Answer 1

If we assume that you took in ~600 calories per day then you'd have had to burn 2000 calories daily as a resting metabolic rate in order to see that much weight loss. for a 200lb man, it's not out of the realm of possibility. If we assume that your stored glycogen was depleted during this time, and its accompanying stored water was lost (which should both be true), then we see a figure closer to 1500 resting TDEE.

I don't think there's any reason to assume an exceptional rate of apoptosis here. Even if you did, you'd have to make sweeping assumptions about which types of cells might die and what their weights could be. Beyond that, if additional cells did die, they would be resorbed and re-used rather than simply excreted. So I don't think there is an appropriate numeric answer to your question, but I hope this gives you some insight.

:)