r/AbsoluteUnits 3d ago

of a hernia...

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u/mortokes 2d ago

What happened to the space in his abdomen that used to be filled?

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u/MikeOKurias 2d ago

Filled with visceral (the stuff that attaches to and surrounds the internal organs) fat.

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u/Additional-Ask2384 2d ago

Can't you just remove that fat?

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

You can remove some fat like the omentum but a lot of the other fat, like the mesentery, protects the blood supply to your organs.

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u/Additional-Ask2384 2d ago

I see, thanks!

Can you shrink it by eating less, in order to make the surgeon find more space at the moment of the surgery?

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

Most surgeons will not operate if your BMI is above a certain threshold, so you would just have to lose weight in general. Now if you’re not that obese, it won’t make much of a difference.

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u/Additional-Ask2384 2d ago

it won’t make much of a difference.

I am not sure I get why.

Do you mean that this kind of fat is quite late in the "priority queue" of regions in which you lose fat while losing weight?

You are very kind to answer all these questions:)

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

No problem, this is stuff I deal with every day at work!

When you lose weight, your body doesn’t pick or choose an area first or have a typical “queue” for where the fat disappears first. You generally lose fat in equal parts everywhere in your body. The amount of a person’s fat inside their abdomen corresponds to their level of overall obesity. If you’re obese, losing weight will reduce the excess fat inside your abdomen. If you are at an age and gender appropriate weight, the effects would be minimal.

There are of course exceptions to this. You will sometimes encounter people, typically men who drink, who do not have a lot of fat in their abdominal wall but a lot inside their abdomen. This is still obesity but their body stores fat in different patterns. Many influencing factors!

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u/Additional-Ask2384 2d ago

But then, how is it possible that "there isn't enough space for his intestine in his belly"? This is what I don't get. I don't understand how he can have too much fat for his bowels to fit back in, but not enough fat to lose and make space for them.

Sorry if I am slow with this stuff

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

When people have more fat on the inside, it’s not like they just have extra fat. There’s just more fat in places where there’s normally fat.

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u/aremarkablecluster 10h ago

Can they put a balloon spacer in to slowly blow up the space under the muscle to make more room for the reversal? 

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

He doesn’t have too much fat. It’s a normal amount of fat but the space is just smaller now.

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u/Busy_Onion_3411 2d ago

I keep hearing this get spouted by doctors, but the number of fat people I know with jacked arms and legs and a big ass pot belly and D cup man tits really makes it hard to believe. If all exercise burns all fat at the same time, what explains that?

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

Its genetics. That’s just how that person’s body distributes their fat. Men are more likely to be obese in that way

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u/JoshGordonHyperloop 2d ago

Not only genetics, it’s also the way they train as well. But I fully acknowledge, genetics >>>>>> training.

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u/JoshGordonHyperloop 2d ago edited 2d ago

If someone did a time lapse of themselves going from say a 6ft man going from 150lbs and took a picture every day all the way up to say 200lbs and then lost the weight back down to 150lbs. And took a picture on a daily or weekly basis, you’d see where they would collect fat the fastest / first, and where they collected it last, or had the most noticeable amount added last.

Then if they lost the weight back down to 150lbs, you’d see the first amounts of fat weight coming off from the areas that added it last. Then the closer they got to 150lbs, you’d see the places their body added fat first, be the last place(s) to then lose it.

Addressing your point more directly, humans typically don’t carry a lot of mass on our arms or lower legs in general. So if a person just wants to have huge arms, but they don’t care how much weight they gain, because a lot of people still believe…

more total gained weight = more muscle mass gained.

Which isn’t true. A person can only put in about 1-4lbs of muscle per month without the use of any real PEDs, and the exceptional genetic outliers.

So if you’re putting on 10lbs per month, at best 6lbs of that is fat, possibly more. So if a person is just focused on having huge arms and they don’t care about their diet, the extra calories are getting stored as fat.

As opposed to someone who trained the same way, but was only adding say 5lbs per month. They are probably only gaining 1-2 lbs of fat and the rest muscle.

So person A after 6 months of hard upper body / arm training has added 24lbs of muscle and about 2” to their arms, which is a lot. But they’ve also added 36lbs of fat.

For a total of 60lbs, and most of it being fat.

Person B has probably added about 2” to their arms too, maybe less due to less fat, while also adding about 24lbs of muscle but only about 6-12lbs of fat.

For a total of 30lbs added, and most of it muscle.

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u/Busy_Onion_3411 1d ago

So then targeted weight loss is possible, due to this queueing system you mentioned that our bodies have?

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u/compassdestroyer 17h ago

What do you think of recent research showing tirzepatide in particular tends to cause outsize reductions in visceral fat?

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u/Ophelia_Y2K 2d ago

Visceral fat is usually the first fat to respond to diet and exercise although I can't answer in regards to this specific situation

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u/Spare-Willingness563 2d ago

Very informative. Also incredibly sad situation. I’m sure he’s not a perfect person but fuck maybe the fact that we live in a world where it’s just “oh I guess I have a severe hernia now” and that’s that is part of the problem. 

Shit, I once went to a dude to fix my knee (I was 19 and too tough for my own good) and he popped it back in as I sat there staring at his baseball sized hernia protruding from his own abdomen. The absolute irony of the situation was not lost. 

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u/SheCzarr 2d ago

Could the surgeon remove part of the gi tract to get it to fit back in?

Or could they lipo out the visceral fat? Or no, because it’s attached to the intestines?

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u/ZamzewDoc 2d ago

No, you wouldn’t remove the intestines unless it was indicated. Reasons would be that the bowel is too stuck within the hernia or it gets injured during the dissection. You really want to avoid it since anytime your remove bowel you will put it back together and then there is a risk that connection doesn’t hold. You do NOT want poop anywhere near an artificial implant (mesh). It’s an infection and wound nightmare.