So walking across the country isn’t exercising? My issue was JJIm apparently thinking anyone can lose 30 lbs in 10 days (seriously 10 days?) by walking a lot.
To clarify, Steve admits that he ballooned to 410 lbs due to stuffing his face with enormous quantities of food and underexercising. He has never claimed to have a “slow metabolism” or “thyroid problem”, which are the most common medical excuses claimed by many of the obese.
30 lbs in 10 days doesn’t seem feasible to me. To lose 3 lbs a day at 3500 calories per pound, a person would have to achieve a daily calorie of 10,500 calories. At a burn rate about 100 calories per mile, a person would have to walk 105 miles, or the equivalent of almost FOUR marathons, every day to burn that much fat.
Steve, OTOH, reportedly walked only about 5 miles a day. And stuffed his face with fast food every step of the way. :rolleyes:
Yes you absolutely can. I wasn’t obese but I was definitely very overweight and out of shape. I have two pictures taken of me, one before the trek, and one after. In one of them I was 175 lbs, and have a fat neck that started at my ears and went down to my shoulders, and in the other I was 145 lbs and you could see my cheekbones - I looked “like Michael Stipe” according to one friend. We walked up hills for 6-8 hours every day and ate dal bhat for lunch and dinner.
While I don’t doubt there are metabolisms out there that would resist exercise, I speculate that they are vanishingly rare. And usually, the larger you are, the quicker you lose weight. I went on this particular trek with a friend who was seriously obese - 250 lbs. He lasted three days trekking before he collapsed. He lost 40 lbs, despite the fact that the Nepalese village he stayed in complained, when we came back to get him, that he’d managed to eat every single one of their chickens during his sojourn.
Send me the money for a ticket to Kathmandu, and a team of scientists, and I’ll prove it to you. 
jjimm was walking up and down hills, over rough terrain, in thin, dry air, likely over 15,000’, likely carrying a few dozen pounds in addition to his own bodyweight. That’s quite a different ballgame from plodding along a few miles on the treadmill in a cozy little fitness club.
He might have been a little dehydrated but I have no problem believing that what he said could be true.
Not exactly the same but, human metabolisms are not normally all that that wildly different unless there’s a disease involved. Typical burn ranges for human metabolisms are typically 11-14 calories per lb of body weight with med-low exercise levels and can also be affected by age, condition and genetic disposition. I’m not intimately familiar with his story but a few practical issues come to mind.
As a large framed person and an ex-fat guy with a relatively slow metabolism I didn’t weight as much as FMW, but I can’t see how a 420 lb man’s feet would take the pounding of traveling more than few miles per day. I have size 13 D-E feet and at my heaviest anything more than three miles or so a day was painful.
If he was walking several hours per day,* even with a slow metabolism* at that rate of exercise he would be burning around 13-14 calories per lb of body weight daily which equates to 400 lbs x 14 = 5600 calories per day. Even if he ate 3000 calories per day (5600 expended - 3000 intake ) he should have been losing (2600 per day x 7) 18,200 per week or about (18,200/3600) 5 lbs a week. Even accounting for his declining weight he should have lost around 20 lbs per month at a minimum unless he was literally gorging himself.
At 420 lbs he should have lost a lot more weight given the distance and time he walked unless he wasn’t really walking it, was only traveling a few miles a day, or was gorging himself.
Never mind I just read Plastic Jesus’ comment
What he lost is about exactly what you would expect over time if you were overweight and continued to eat like a hog, but did 5 miles worth of walking exercise per day.
If anyone’s interested, a little more on his, eh, ‘journey’ from this 2015 article:Fat Man Walking