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Lumifer comments on Ketogenic Soylent - Less Wrong Discussion
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That seems highly unlikely. Consider the evolutionary consequences of such a trait.
For a randomly chosen person, sure (as per your reply to drethelin); but assuming he hasn't outright lied about his weight loss attempts, it's not that unlikely that EY would be one of the exceptions. (Consider the evolutionary consequences of homosexuality -- and yet gay people do exist.)
I haven't followed EY's attempts at weight loss, but it's entirely normal for people entering (or trying to enter) ketosis to feel lousy for a while. Effectively you're starving your body of glucose and until the metabolism adjusts many, probably most, will feel weak, light-headed, have headaches, suffer from low energy, etc. I wouldn't be surprised (but I have no data) if people which glucose regulation issues, e.g. pre-diabetics, would be particularly prone to this.
I am also not sure what does "body will just stop maintenance" actually mean. Mitochondria will stop producing ATF? Protein synthesis will stop? What?
I don't know of anyone of normal or higher weight who started to eat below maintenance level (while avoiding major nutritional deficiencies) and then just died or came close to death instead of losing weight. Do you know of any such cases?
True that. I wonder how long he tried to endure that state before giving up on each attempt.
I think Nancy Lebovitz once linked to a page listing a dozen or so such cases.
She linked to http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/kjn/people/heaviest.htm
Um, that's a horror show of very sick people. I don't see how it's relevant to the current discussion.
There is a non-zero number of people who, if they eat less than they consume, would starve to death before reaching a normal weight. For all we know EY might be one of them.
It may depend on what you mean by starve to death-- from what I've heard, fat people who starve and die before reaching a "normal" weight die of heart damage from inadequate food.
Evidence, please?
The link above didn't show people starving to death (in the causal sense). The only relevant mention that I see is for Michael Edelman about whom the text says "At about 600 lbs, he literally starved to death. (Link - 1)", but the link is dead and I'm not quite willing to take the word of this webpage for that.
Bodies do stop (or at least slow) maintenance under stress-- this is a good short term strategy and a bad long term strategy.
Losing weight or being thin are not evolutionary goals. People's bodies are full of mutations or long-term genetic factors that can kill them, and they haven't all been evolved away. Since this is a long-term risk that hasn't killed him for years it won't have impacted his primary breeding and evolution may well have left it alone.
Surviving through periods of low food availability (=eating less calories) is a very strong evolutionary goal.
Remember adaptation executors not fitness maximizers, and we're far from the ancestral environment.
And we eat many foods that didn't exist in our ancestral environment.