I know he was doing the water-loss thing. Just like high school wrestling, he told me. I doubt he did the lead weights. That would have been blatant cheating, and he was a pretty straight shooter.
Yeah, like I said, he looked like hell after. He was about a 175-180 pound guy, if I recall, before the weight loss. I guessing he had about 10-15 pounds of water loss for the weigh-in. Not unusual at all for boxers or wrestlers.
Me, I’m 5’9" and 155. I guarantee I could lose 20 pounds in two months, and another 10 pounds of water for the weigh-in, if the price was right.
Look at it this way: A pound of body fat is equal to about 3500 calories. An average lazy guy burns about 2000 calories a day with doing anything majorly physical or strenuous. So taken to the extreme, if you don’t eat at all, you’ll lose about 17 pounds of fat per month. More realistically, if you cut your calorie intake in half and increase your exercise, 10 pounds per months is easily doable.
Definitely coke or meth. You won’t even want to eat.
100 pounds of fat? Hard to pull off.
Let’s look at the severe calorie restriction approach, or as the medical literature refers to it, very low calorie diets (VLCDs), defined as 400 to 800 calories/day with generally at least 50 grams of protein and adequate vitamins and minerals, etc.
They work but not any better than diets with 800 to 1200 calories/day, at any time frame measured including 6 weeks to 4 months to 1 year to follow up 5 years out. Initial weight loss the first 6 weeks in either is dramatic, often over 5 pounds a week totaling up over 30 pounds (and some studies documented that coming from fat almost exclusively with enough protein) but then slowing down. By a few months into it both were averaging that classic 1 kg a week or less for the whole course. (Simplistic understandings of the first law of thermodynamics be damned.)
So that can get you down 30 pretty fast but not any faster to 100 than conventional approaches, if ever. (Barring a concentration camp style diet or heavy meth-headdom, where the loss of weight from muscle, vital organs and brain, and possible death, are not worries to be avoided.)
Nope, the only thing that can likely meet that goal without a death camp is indeed bariatric surgery which can get there by a year and often maintain it.
Of course as I’ve pointed out on (and cited) these boards often before the lion’s share of the health benefits can be gained with much less loss, maybe 5 to 10% of body weight, if accomplished and maintained by changes in diet and exercise habits.