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Hi, I have a question, probably a stupid question: His cells have the same size as ours, so when he was weighting 1000 pounds, he must have something like 5 tim

Hi, I have a question, probably a stupid question: His cells have the same size as ours, so when he was weighting 1000 pounds, he must have something like 5 times the amount of cells of a "normal" person. Where went those cells when he lost weight? Some of them (mostly skin) have been removed chirurgically as usually done in similar cases, but do you have any insight for cells in internal organs? (edited)

jclos 10y ago
It's not a stupid question at all. Here is my layman understanding of it: fat cells actually don't have the same size, they get larger or smaller as the effect of caloric surplus or deficit. You can create new fat cells (something called hyperplasia) in some extreme cases of obesity, which probably happened in this guy's case, but that's in addition to the growing fat cells themselves. Nature has a short news on the topic here: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080505/full/news.2008.800.html http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080505/full/news.2008.800.ht...