Am I the one that's weird? Or is it the doctors who see the fecal transplant as a last-ditch effort only after surgery?
But doctors are part of a complicated system that prevents wild-ass medical experiments from being tried on humans. If you go in front of a review board [1] and say, "Hey, we'd like to try experimenting on live humans by giving them an unknown collection of microorganisms in hope that unspecified good things will happen", I can't imagine that it will go well.
Like it or not, the best currently proven treatment is the band. To prove that something else is better is a lot of work. I strongly share your suspicion that fecal transplants would be better, and if I were desperate that's what I'd try with my own body. But medical history is littered with treatments that looked promising but didn't work out, often because of hideous unexpected side effects.
I read recently that it took 25 years to stop x-raying pregnant women after a British doctor found that it lead to birth defects.
And the unnecessary surgeries and medication and scans. I really find it hard to think of this as a conservative industry governed by "first, do no harm". These are all well-tested, according the establishment.
Fecal bacteria may not be well tested by the establishment, but its something we have been living with for millions of years. Many animals are constantly exposed to fecal matter. And so are you if you ride public transportation.
Maybe what this approach needs is someone like Craig Venter to sequence all the bacteria found in generally healthy people and people with specific problems. He did this in the oceans and found all this previously undiscovered genomes. That same tech could probably determine what strains of bacteria to start testing just from their absence in the unhealthy.
At the same time, their presence in the perfectly healthy indicates that the bacteria in question probably isn't dangerous. Of course, how specific individuals will react is always an unknown. But that remains an unknown even after something is well tested.
When I hear all the possible side effects of accepted drugs, which often include death, I have to wonder if there isn't some bias in favor of things created in a lab and where someone stands to make large profits. These drugs are recalled all the time and class action suits are common.
None of this inspires much confidence in how treatments are evaluated.
There are quite a few well-funded projects doing this on a large scale, see http://www.human-microbiome.org/index.php?id=30 for a comprehensive list. Not just the gut but other bacterial sites like skin, mouth, nasal cavity, urinary tract, etc.
People have gained weight on half as many calories.
2000 calories hasn't worked for a lot of people, perhaps because the gut bacteria is too efficient and the body alters their metabolism.
But then you go on to say people have gained weight on 1000 calories. So how is there starvation involved?
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Why-people-become-ove...
When I was completely sedentary, anything more than about 1200 calories per day would cause me to gain weight (entirely fat). And this is with an extremely controlled diet of mostly fresh fruits and vegetables over the course of a year.
I wish I could eat 2100 calories per day. That sounds like such a luxury.
The thermic effect of various foods is so wide that you can have a 30% effective calorie swing based on what you eat. Protein for instance requires about 30% of the calories just to digest it. Fat? 3%
I think that's really where most people are at. With varying degrees of consumption capacity. So the question is, do we want to "fix" ourselves so that we can consume more just because we like to eat? I don't really feel like that's a direction we should be trying to go.
Weight training does not necessarily burn a lot of calories, particularly fat calories. It primarily depletes glycogen reserves, which are quickly replenished in 1-2 meals and a good night's rest.
There is good evidence that people who seem "naturally thin" actually burn a lot more energy throughout the day by moving in small, maybe unconscious ways:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18223609
This is the concept behind products like the FitBit, which attempts to show people the totality of their activity throughout the day.
If I may, have you considered experimenting with different macro nutrient compositions for your diet? Low-fat, low-carb?
Best of luck.
I know it's the prevailing wisdom, but I've never seen any study that actually supports that.
I want a citation that "exercise and diet" are enough to convert a fat person to a thin person. Trivially, that's true - just stop feeding person until they starve and almost die, and then feed a little.
But the non-trivial question is: Given person X who is now fat (possibly a result of binge eating, but possibly a result of disease, some kind of pharmaceutical treatment, etc.) - can exercising and reducing intake alone make them thin, without damaging their psyche, without limiting their intellectual potential and mental well being?
There is NO reason to believe that the answer is a simple "yes". People who claim that the answer is definitely yes should be able to back their claims easily, if this is so trivial.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sam-feltham/why-i-didnt-get-...
There are enough data points of (thin person, does not exercise or eat properly) and (fat person, exercises and eats "properly") to make that point basically wrong.
Perhaps the problem is with the definition of "properly". But the causation is not total (that is, there are reasons other than food and exercise that cause people to become fat, some known and some unknown), and the population correlation is time reversed to what you would expect (people stop exercising AFTER they gain weight, not BEFORE), to make this not a trivial matter at all.
I don't think you're unique in your aversion to the knife (I know people who have risked serious long-term health issues by avoiding surgery), but maybe not many people are weird enough to prefer the fecal enema.