• San Francisco nurse Mike Schultz has gone viral after sharing dramatic before-and-after weight loss photos following his COVID-19 battle.
  • “I wanted to show everyone how badly being sedated for six weeks on a ventilator or intubated can be,” he wrote on Instagram.
  • Doctors explain why severe infections can cause dramatic weight loss in patients.

San Francisco nurse Mike Schultz has gone viral after sharing dramatic before-and-after weight loss photos following his COVID-19 battle. Schultz shared the side-by-side photos on Instagram, and the comparison is jaw-dropping. In the “before” photo, he looks buff and muscular; In the “after” photo, which appears to be shot in a hospital bathroom, he’s noticeably thinner.

“I wanted to show everyone how badly being sedated for six weeks on a ventilator or intubated can be,” Schultz wrote in the caption. “Amongst other things, COVID-19 reduced my lung capacity with pneumonia. Over eight weeks I’ve been away from family and friends. Getting stronger everyday and working to increase my lung capacity. I’ll get back to where I was in healthier ways this time....maybe even do cardio 😱.”

mike schultz
Instagram/Mike Schultz (@thebearded_nurse)

Schultz, 43, revealed in a later post that he ended up spending 57 days in the hospital, and he later told Buzzfeed News that he was 190 pounds when he was hospitalized. Now, he weighs 140 pounds.

Wait, how can the novel coronavirus cause extreme weight loss?

COVID-19 can cause lots of side effects and complications, like trouble breathing and extreme fatigue, but unintended weight loss can happen, too, says Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

It’s not uncommon to lose a little weight when you’re sick, says Richard Watkins, M.D., an infectious disease physician and a professor of internal medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University. “Weight loss is common when the body is under a lot of stress, as is the case with a COVID-19 infection,” he adds.

But extreme weight loss, like what Schultz went through, is likely because his case of COVID-19 was so severe. “He didn’t have a simple case—he was on a mechanical ventilator for six weeks,” Dr. Adalja says. “When people are in an intensive care unit for that long, it’s not uncommon for them to lose a lot of weight.”

People on ventilators can’t eat because they have a tube in their mouth, Dr. Adalja explains. So, they’re given liquid nutrition from a feeding tube (in Schultz’s case, it looks like his feeding tube was attached to his stomach), and that may end up providing less calories than what they normally eat.

Your body actually requires more nutrition than usual when you’re fighting off a serious infection like COVID-19, says intensive care unit nurse Amita Avadhani, D.N.P., an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing.“Your protein and basic nutrition requirements go up because your expenditure—what your body is using up—is higher,” she says.

At the same time, being critically ill puts your body into a state where it breaks down muscle mass to meet its energy needs, Dr. Adalja says. “Your body secretes molecules that cause this to happen,” he says. However, that’s not specific to COVID-19—it can happen to anyone who spends extended time in an ICU.

Dr. Adalja says it’s unlikely that people who develop more mild cases of COVID-19 will see weight loss like this. Fortunately, in most cases, people who experience extreme weight loss from a severe infection will eventually regain the weight.

Schultz seems to be slowly getting better. He shared in an Instagram post on Wednesday that he’s “able to do more and more every day.”


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Headshot of Korin Miller
Korin Miller
Korin Miller is a freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Self, Glamour, and more. She has a master’s degree from American University, lives by the beach, and hopes to own a teacup pig and taco truck one day.