The Shrine

A long time ago I was reading Kindaichi, it had a scenario like this:

There's this killer on the loose, you don't know who he is, but the killer refers to himself as the vampire and the victims all have messy blood cuts. The premise of this is in real life, so it's not like this guy actually drinks the victim's blood.

There's a secret conveyor belt or something that will allow you to get from point A to point B as a shortcut, but the conveyor belt can only support say, 120 pounds of weight, or it'll collapse.

There's this girl who is around 123 pounds. She got kidnapped by the vampire and then mysteriously showed up across the path that is only reachable (within the timeframe) through the secret conveyor belt. She lost a ton of blood (but still alive) and her hair was cut off too. If only it was possible to move the girl through the secret conveyor belt you'd know who did it, but how is this done?

Now every single person I have asked who tried to lose weight at some point of their life can figure this out, so my question is this. Let's say you're one of those guys who is blessed with NEVER having to lose weight in your entire life (we may not have any of them here, who knows), would it be hard for you to figure out how to get the girl through the secret conveyor belt?

I guess the author must be blessed with never having to lose weight in his life to think this is a mystery. In fact, I had a good chuckle when it turned out the girl was not found completely naked on the other side, since that's the first thing I'd do to try to get under a weight threshold.

Sweat. We carry around a lot of water weight. I've lost as much as 5 pounds of water in a single jiu-jitsu practice. And water's a lot easier to replace than blood. Although losing water weight has no impact on body fat, so I'm not sure what that has to do with "trying to lose weight."

Well Kindachi follows a pretty standard 'every piece of information ever mentioned has to be relevent' so the solution is that she lost enough blood + hair to get the 3 pounds under which is why the killer was known as the vampire so the blood part wouldn't look suspicious. Yes I am aware it probably makes no sense (drawing that much blood should've killed you) and there are far easier way to lose a relatively small amount of weight. I am actually not too worried about the logic behind this. I'm just really surprised anybody (as an author) would be so blessed with having no weight problem to think people can't think of how you'd lose such a trivial amount of weight. The whole mystery of the arc was that they can't figure out how the mysterious vampire was able to get the girl across the secret conveyor belt when her original weight is only 3 pounds over the limit. Assuming the author doesn't just assume everyone is totally stupid or is himself totally stupid, it's rather envious if you think about it if you're someone where losing 3 pounds appears to be difficult because you never needed to lose weight.

I remember one of my high school friends competed in the lowest weight division for wrestling and sometimes he'd need to lose weight in a hurry to not move up a division, and pretty sure he was under 100 pounds and doesn't exactly have much fat to lose at all, but he can still do it. It's not necessarily healthy but it's certainly doable.

Wrestling is notorious for its weight cutting. This practice has carried over into MMA. Olympic lifting, though, is an example of a weight class sport where not much weight cutting happens. Some MMA fighters cut as much as 30 pounds over the course of their training camp. They can also weight 10 - 15 pounds more during their fight than they do on the scale.

Anyway, I thought the blood thing was obvious, and you were asking us how we would do it.

Isn't it a rather significant advantage if you gained 10 pounds between the time they weighted you and when you actually fight? I posed the question wondering if anyone would have a background where losing such a small amount of weight would seem unfathomable. I went back and checked the character profiles in Kindaichi and pretty much everyone is impossibly lean, like Takato the main villian has a weight of ~100 pounds, and most characters look about as lean as him, so I'm thinking this is really a case where the case where the author has it way better than most normal people.

I looked up the arc again and it's 47KG -> 46.1 KG in a period of about 2 hours (so about 2 pounds). I'm pretty sure I can go to sleep and wake up and see my weight change by two pounds, and you're talking about a world where the murderers can just use a portable flamethrower to make you sweat enough or something. After all in this case apparently there was enough time for the murderer to do two blood transfusions with basically no equipment. These guys are more resourceful than MacGuyver!

Yes, it can be, which is why people do it. "Cutting weight" is a part of the sport. But it's also a significant disadvantage if you attempt to cut too much weight, because then you don't recover from the cut and have no endurance for the fight itself.