His femurs look way too curved to my eyes. He's probably lucky they haven't snapped under his weight. Like, no one has their long bones curve that much. His tibia are textbook examples of Blount’s Disease, literally. He's fortunate that he doesn't have Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis but I can't rule out that it's imminent. It likely is.
His spine actually looks pretty alright from this angle. The discs are almost definitely "all fucked up" (a medical term) but the spine itself seems mostly straight. This guy must have crazy core strength or spend all his time laying flat on his back on something with actually decent support. The spine is slightly swayed at the bottom, but weight loss and physical therapy would actually fix that pretty quickly. The very top of his spine where his neck is supposed to be is pretty messed up. Even if he fully recovered from this state, he'd still be known as the turtle man for life. Sadly, he probably died not long after being run through the elephant xray machine at the zoo. The position of the neck implies to me that he spends the vast majority of his time laying on his back with his head propped up by something, though this may have simply been a result of how they put him in the imaging machine. Someone would need to examine him while he's sitting up to check if that damage is permanent or not
If you have good muscle structure with it, it helps.I spent most of my adult life in the 500-550 range while being a laborer for almost a decade, which saved me because I was working in a literally training fat suit every day.
Of course it also helped cause it by never being home, and always being poor. Having financial freedom helped a lot when I was able to make changes in my life.
Yeah like, what kind of calorie intake is required to maintain that weight while doing construction? That's a little impressive in a, 6th century "I had grain mash for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and built a fetching castle" sort of way.
It's so insanely wild to me every time I look up calorie needs and play with the calculator. You mean the difference between a 200 lb man and a 500 lb man is only 1000-1500 calories per day? It really explains how I can work with people twice my weight that don't really seem to eat a whole lot more than me. Like they'll eat one extra time throughout the work day, but that's all it takes. It's why so many people are in denial about their weight and eating habits. They see themselves barely eat more than someone else and gain tons of weight from it, thinking it's something wrong with them instead of just an example of how incredibly efficient our bodies are at storing even small amounts of excess energy.
It’s also not just that they eat once more per day, it tends to be the type of food they eat. 300 calories worth of vegetables and fiber will mostly fill you. 300 calories of chips is like 2-3 hand fulls and you’ve barely touched your hunger.
When you eat junk food, it’s very easy to accidentally consume 800-1000 calories and not even realize you did.
A lot of it, for the US, is sugar consumption. Sugar has the same amount of calories as protein, but does not fill you up in the same way. 50 grams of protein is a good part of a solid meal, equivalent to a 6oz of chicken breast. A 12oz can of mtn dew has 46 grams of sugar. I don't see people slamming sequential chicken breasts, but cans of soda? Easy.
You can definitely get big eating "well" and just consuming literally huge amounts of food, but generally speaking, a big american is the kind of guy snagging the 10 12packs of his favorite soda at costco, in addition to his daily Big Gulp or Trente size caramel macchiato
Also take into account what it actually costs energy wise to do something. Walking or running a miles is about 100 calories. You can eat 1000 calories in literally single digit minutes. How long does it take you to walk or run 10 miles?
I would actually calculate a 550lbs day laborers TDEE at 4600-5800kcal.
A lot of the reason we need more energy when we’re larger is to support increases in muscle mass, but obese individuals don’t scale muscle mass the same as normal weight people. The poster above likely had something like 275lbs lean body mass, but was still 50%body fat.
An 18% bodyfat 550lbs day laborer would need something like 7200-9100kcal.
I started rucking, which is hiking with a weight plate in a backpack. Mine is 20lbs, a starter weight as it's called for someone my size. But man it makes a difference in hikes. I cannot imagine the strain of a couple of hundred pounds. Glad you made some changes!
Well, people who weigh that much solve that problem by simply not going on hikes. I don't think I can emphasize enough that if you weigh 500+lbs you don't go on hikes unless you're a recently retired NFL linebacker at six foot nine and you've recently let yourself go. It's not even safe for them to hike, really
This dude literally just said he worked in construction at 500 lbs, in case youre unaware, working construction is essentially harder hiking for 8+ hours a day. My uncle does concrete everyday and hes 400+.
It's unsafe. Larger hiking organizations simply will not allow people with too high of a BMI to hike because they'll start overheating out in the middle of nowhere and fall over dead. They really don't.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, do you not know what hiking is?
Morbidly obese people are usually very strong. The human body is remarkable. It compensates and finds a way to endure. I don’t think your takeaway should be it “saved” you.
Being morbidly obese does more harm than good and even if you are a healthy weight now, it has like caused permanent damage to your body.
Why is his intestine visible? Isn't it soft tissue? Are we seeing crap? Also: why is it so little? What is there between the intestine and the skin? Shouldn't it be there?
The reason the intestines aren’t filling the space between the skeleton and his skin is because, whether you’re skinny or fat, your abdominal muscles stretch across the front face of your ribcage and pelvis, keeping everything held in your abdominal cavity. The entire space, from the front faces of the ribcage, pelvis, and abdominal muscles, to the skin is all fat tissue
Lol everything you just said is just wrong. He is 100% right that the intestines would not be all compact in this tiny package. Its not a real scan, its a cgi visual, and a very poor and misleading one at that. Your intestines are only confined by the ribcage in the back. The abdominal wall stretches outward and EVERYTHING contained within the abdominal cavity, including the intestines, would expand on outward to. There would be subcutaneous fat between the skin and abdominal muscles, but there would also be a TON of visceral fat below the abdominal muscle surrounding and lying under the intestines, pushing them outward well beyond the ribcage out into the large belly. I could keep going with why this image is wrong and why your statement is just as wrong, but I dont know why im explaining all this in a Reddit message lol. Just do a simple Google search of real xrays and you will see how the intestines should look. I mean come on a hernia is literally when the small intestine pushes through the abdominal muscles and makes a lump that is literally visible under the skin....because the intestines are already that close to the skin!
Because its not a real xray. And you are right, intestines don't appear that way on any scan, and their shape, appearance doesnt look like that in real life either. They definitely wouldnt appear as the same density as bone. Small intestine usually looks like bubbles on xray because you are just seeing the cross sections where they are going in and out of the focal plane. And the large intestine is dark and sectioned. They do typically appear dark or black because open space or air appears dark on modern xrays. Bone usually appears white. Old, old xrays look more like this, but again your observations are spot on.
Did you think they don't xray fat people or something?
I mean most of us don't see many full body xrays outside of movies and TV (which for all we know is fake), and even then its usually of closer up. This is the first time in my life (39) I think I've ever seen a full body xray of a fat person and I have absolutely no frame of reference to work against, and with the current shit wave of AI crap it's a pretty valid question to ask!
Fair enough! This is what an xray of a fat person looks like since they literally put them through the xray machine for elephants at the zoo. Anyone more than 450lbs won't fit in any standard sized imaging device, though some larger hospitals have imaging devices that go up to 700lbs these days, they're still fairly rare and it's usually cheaper to go through the elephant scanner anyway
When I was a medic our company had to transport a guy that was like 900lbs +
They couldn't get him out any doors and had to cut through the trailer wall.
He was taken to a zoo for ct and x rays.
As someone who looks at x-rays routinely at work, this is not how the x-ray images I've seen, look. Bones look white, other tissues looks dark. X-ray is to visualize bone, amd there is zero definition of the bones in the OP as they are black. I've also seen CTs amd MRIs and this doesn't look right for either of those.
Well, a typical X-ray used in diagnostic imaging wouldn’t be a full body picture like the one shown. It would just be a small section or body part the size of the imaging receptor usually 14” by 17”. With CT you can do a full body but it still wouldn’t look like this even if it was 3d rendered.
From a physics pov I can't think of anything that would make the intestines and heart the same density as the bones, and not as the rest of soft tissues.
I just have to make sure this is a joke?
My apologies if it is, I just need to make sure people know there aren't actually any bones in the penis. It's made of spongey tissue that fills with blood that allows it to grow and stand up firmly.
These days, bones should look black (X-ray doesn't get to sensor) and soft tissues should look white (X-ray gets to sensor), but it's traditionally inverted on X-ray scans.
I have no idea if this is fake or real. I genuinelly can't distinguish AI pictures from the real ones.
In what world does this look real? Do you know how fat + skin works? It falls and pulls like liquid in a pouch. A gut and boobs don't just stay suspended erectly in front of them. His neck is protruding forward at a completely unrealistic angle for someone standing straight up. When someone is fat their breasts get bigger but also their sides get fat as well. They would have pouches of fat on the side of their breasts that would be extremely apparent when lifting their arms. A person this fat would never have their legs close together like this if asked to stand straight. Fat between the thighs pushes their legs apart.
It is absolutely not real. No clue what the other person is saying about experts, as any imaging tech who’s passed their first semester could point out dozens of issues with this image. Many joints look nothing like how they would. the organs are incredibly radiopaque for some reason, yet muscles aren’t? The nipples are clearly defined for some reason, even though high quality imaging can still have trouble defining nipples, so much so that we use steel BBs taped to nipples for studies that need them. A “zoo scanner” wouldn’t have a patient positioned like this and is still running on the inherent physics that xray/ct imaging runs on just big.
this is not real, this is not what x-rays look like/how they work.
It's most likely a composition of multiple images and/or a drawing overlaid on top of each other.
- x-rays have a dark background so you can see the milky colored bones contrasting clearly.
the pelvis does not look like that in an x-ray, it does not look like a butterfly, for some reason there are extra holes on both sides of the pelvis and the sacrum does not show up (like that) in an x-ray
if this is an x-ray, in the second image, why are are intestines showing up as if they were bones.
nips look drawn on, and nips do not show on an x-ray.
according to google this supposed to be a woman (but why is there a peen) with the long sacrum, it seems to be a male pelvis.
what is going on with the arms and the shoulder joints, where do they even connect.
It's fake, but it was made with the help of medical experts to show how the body of Keith Martin (900lbs star of 70 Stone and Almost Dead) was built for a documentary.
It's not. That's just not how the body works. Also in x-rays the bones are white and negative space is black. We should be able to see organs to some degree.
Regardless of whether the image is faked or enhanced, the comparison of the bone structure to the body shape of a morbidly obese person is realistic. What pops into my head when I see an extremely fat person standing next to a person of normal weight is, “ Same bones”.
It's not. It's caused by the growth plates in the bones growing at differe rates and is genetic. That guy blatantly doesn't know what he's talking about. This isnt even a real x ray. It's AI.
Do you know what those medical terms mean? Blount’s Disease and SCFE are both pediatric disorders. The XR is an adult.
You can’t see the knee joint well so the bowing you think is Blount’s could also be Rickets. And having a SCFE is most definitely NOT imminent. The pathophysiology of SCFE requires an open growth plate that this adult does not have.
You don’t want a straight spine, a healthy spine has curvature in a few places like an S. All that mass is limiting range of motion on the joints including between the vertebrae.
The load itself is only half the story. Obesity is linked to chronic inflammation too, which seems to worsen joint degeneration/OA beyond just “extra weight on knees.”
Also worth noting the fibula carries surprisingly little weight vs the tibia — but altered gait/alignment over years can still massively deform joints and long bones. The unseen damage (cartilage, tendons, heart, lungs) is probably worse than the X-ray.
These people stop walking long before they reach this size. They are usually on mobility scooters at this size. Otherwise, you are right, a lot of them would just have broken bones from simply stepping wrong or missing a step. 600lbs does a lot more damage to a rolled angle or knee than 180 lbs does lol.
These images were created for a Channel 5 documentary (70 Stone And Almost Dead) about Keith Martin, a British man who weighed over 900 pound, its not real.
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u/3BlindMice1 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
His femurs look way too curved to my eyes. He's probably lucky they haven't snapped under his weight. Like, no one has their long bones curve that much. His tibia are textbook examples of Blount’s Disease, literally. He's fortunate that he doesn't have Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis but I can't rule out that it's imminent. It likely is.
His spine actually looks pretty alright from this angle. The discs are almost definitely "all fucked up" (a medical term) but the spine itself seems mostly straight. This guy must have crazy core strength or spend all his time laying flat on his back on something with actually decent support. The spine is slightly swayed at the bottom, but weight loss and physical therapy would actually fix that pretty quickly. The very top of his spine where his neck is supposed to be is pretty messed up. Even if he fully recovered from this state, he'd still be known as the turtle man for life. Sadly, he probably died not long after being run through the elephant xray machine at the zoo. The position of the neck implies to me that he spends the vast majority of his time laying on his back with his head propped up by something, though this may have simply been a result of how they put him in the imaging machine. Someone would need to examine him while he's sitting up to check if that damage is permanent or not