So much for caloric deficit and fat loss.
“[Certain genetically obese mice] will fatten excessively regardless of how much they eat. The obesity is not dependent on the number of calories they consume… “These mice will make fat out of their food under the most unlikely circumstances, even when half starved,” [researcher Jean] Mayer had reported. And if starved sufficiently, these animals can be reduced to the same weight as lean mice, but they’ll still be fatter. They will consume the protein in their muscles and organs rather than surrender the fat in their [fat] tissue. Indeed, when these fat mice are starved, they do not become lean mice… they become emaciated versions of fat mice.
Francis Benedict reported this in 1936, when he fasted a strain of obese mice. They lost 60 percent of their body fat before they died of starvation, but still had five times as much body fat as lean mice (!!!!!!)* that were allowed to eat as much as they desired.”
“In 1981, M.R.C. Greenwood reported that if she restricted the diet of an obese strain of rats known as Zucker rats… and did it from birth onward, these rats would actually grow fatter by adulthood than their littermates who were allowed to eat to their hearts’ content. Clearly, the number of calories these rats consumed over the course of their life was not the critical factor in their obesity (unless we are prepared to argue that eating fewer calories induces greater obesity)… these semi-starved Zucker rats had 50% less muscle mass than genetically lean rats, and 30% less muscle mass than the Zucker rats that ate as much as they wanted. They, too, were sacrificing their muscles and organs to make fat.”
