Sure, but there was also a Charles Domery (AKA Domerz)[1]. They even overlapped in time, and were both in/around France.
I like to imagine an alternate history in which a military conflict was settled not with battle, but by pitting these two against each other in an eat-off. They're both alleged cannibals, so I guess the logical end for that competition would have been for the winner to eat the loser.
And no, it also isn't difficult to overheat on a diet that isn't calorie dense. I've since added OMAD, and can eat 2000 calories in one sitting.
Just because you don't have grains and refined sugars as a hyper-dense calorie crutch doesn't mean you cant. It merely means you aren't used to it.
I didn't say a diet that isn't calorie dense. I implied foods. As a lot of the "named" diets happen to cut out the foods that are denser in calories.
I also didn't say impossible. I said difficult. Most people aren't going to try and cram 130 cucumbers in a single daily meal.
And by tracking it "using the labeling on the package" isn't really tracking. That's just looking. And not everything has labeling or packaging.
I've always had success when I'm honest with myself and I ruthlessly record every single source of calories that I ingest.
What I'm saying is that if you eat a serving of something, the package says x calories per package (and x servings per package, for those packages that are clearly one serving but say 2), and you write down all of those values you ate, and you arrive at a number... that number is entirely fictional.
When I say I ate around 2000 calories a day on the SAD (standard American diet), I have no clue. That is the problem with processed food, you have to trust the numbers on the box are correct because you have no clue what the recipe is, if the food could even be expressible in terms of normal ingredients.
Once you cook everything yourself, which also came with the diet change (because everything is contaminated with grains, refined sugars, and just weird strange shit), which makes it much easier to track calories (as USDA values for generic foods seem to actually be in the realm of reality).
If the numbers on the boxes were that wrong, this guy couldn't have done what he did: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
However your story doesn't jive.
If you were eating 2000-2200 calories a day before and after losing the weight, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. The difference between 200 pounds and 350 pounds is... about 1500 calories per day.
Most people are really bad about tracking what they eat in their head. They think they're good at eating for sustenance. It's quite possible that changing to an Atkins-esque diet also cut out a lot of calories because you weren't eating bread or sugar anymore.
Just like a lot of people experience success going on Fuhrman's plan. You cut out bread, sugar, oils, most animal products. What you are left with just isn't that calorie dense. It becomes difficult to overeat calories because you just can't physically fit that much inside of you.
So while some of that may be true. There may be some variance in metabolism, nutrition labeling isn't 100% exact (and honestly, I don't see how it can be considering most of our methods of measuring are destructive so we're basing all values off of a sample), certain foods affect us differently. I don't believe that there is enough variance to account for some of the wild stories I hear like "I wasn't eating anything and not losing weight" or "I eat all day long and never gain a pound".
There's only been one Tarrare. Everyone else who has made that claim has been found to be mistaken about how much or little they eat.