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

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...