Well, up to 8lbs could be water weight. If you have excess calories, your body will retain water. If you disrupt that excess you'll rapidly lose 8 to 10 lbs. Weight loss often has great results in week one, then levels off, so a portion of this could be attributed to eating less and increased stress during a tournament.
8lbs if you're already severely overweight or loaded on carbs, maybe. These guys don't exactly look like they are doing either of that. To put it in a different perspective, that amount of weight loss beats out strict waterfasting at the same weight. You can't get much more strict than straight-up dehydrating (because we all know dehydrating yourself prior to a mental exercise is a great idea) or doing rigorous exercise outside of that.
And no, chess is not rigorous exercise. If it was, the room would be too hot for them to wear suits and tuxedos. Those burned cals have to go somewhere. For the unconvinced, try jogging or lifting 2000 calories worth in a suit at room temperature or slightly above without taking it off.
I bet food poisoning would do it. Because, like you said, they aren't burning those calories - 6,000 calories in a single chess game would leave them in a giant pool of sweat.
This take seems overly skeptical to me. Regardless of truth of the 6,000 calorie claim, that kind of weight loss is extreme in such a short amount of time.
To the contrary, you're being underly skeptical. This is a huge claim to base of a sample size of one guy at one event.
To state the obvious that I hope doesn't need to be said to this audience: a sample size of one tells us exactly nothing. What's saying this one guy one time didn't have a nasty stomach bug?
A crazy claim like this requires some kind of study not just one guy's story.
not unless there is such a change, and it has to be significant to loose such weight. what does happen though is an increase in mental strain as the tournament progresses.
