Can't you just fast to lose weight but then just not eat like a slob and exercise to maintain the weight after? What difference does it make?
Weight loss is thermodynamics. Calories in, calories out. That's it. Everything else is in the head.
Theoretically, yes, you can take a 600 pound man and feed him nothing but hot sauce packets for a few months and then at 200 pounds he can start following a diet perfectly and live the rest of his life at a healthy weight.
Realistically, no. That never happens. If a person is capable of following a diet plan to lose weight, he can do it without a surgery or extreme fasting. If PPP had it in him to cook and eat 1600 calories a day every day, he would not have been almost 400 pounds.
This is all psychological so maybe PPP will simply do exactly what he plans (crash diet by fasting continuously, then eat right), but statistically speaking he would be an extreme outlier among fat people.
Earlier this year I started eating at home almost every day for all my meals. I have been losing 1-2 pounds a week. I was probably 295 at my absolute heaviest in Ukraine, I got down to 275, gained 10 back in Serbia, and then I started dieting again more seriously. I would be doing this with or without a competition. I do not care who wins. I've always been losing weight for myself. I've made this abundantly clear since the beginning. I only challenged Ralph because I thought it'd be funny.
Simply put, I am in a healthy and sustainable lifestyle which is causing me to lose weight. This is a lifestyle I don't mind living for the remainder of my life. I mostly eat at home, sometimes I fast for a day to clear my head, and I order takeout on Friday (which is the day I'm least able to cook for myself). I miss absolutely nothing, I still have something sweet every so often, but because I budget it in I am losing 1kg a week. That's precisely how weight loss should be done. This is the first time in my life I've lost weight this way.
Diet is king. You can run for hours a day and only burn a few hundred calories. That's not even a a single Big Mac. Exercise is good for you, but it is not a key to losing weight. You must refrain from overeating.
As I said before, what PPP is doing is not hard for a fat person to do. He is in a fat person's mindset, which is all-or-nothing. He thinks he can simply starve himself to lose weight, and he's correct, but the concern is what happens after. He won't die from not eating, but his chance of rebounding is very high unless he has a diet he is going to commit to. He absolutely needs to have a diet ready and he needs to count calories so he can get a feel for what ~1800 calories of food a day feels like.
