The word hyperbole is from two Greek words. HUPÉR (above) + BÁLLŌ (I throw). So let me do a little throwing above.
When you learn to scuba dive a very important principle is from Archimedes, supposedly, the law of buoyancy. The key is weight. If the weight of the water which is displaced by some object is heavier than the weight of the object then the object will float and we say it is positively buoyant. My additional rule is a very simple one. Humans are basically fish. How do I know that? We are basically neutrally buoyant, which means if we breathe out we will sink and if we breathe in we will float. But as we get older that can change.
When I was 62 kg all the way through high school until I was about 48 I was neutrally buoyant, actually skinny. But then I started eating Philippine food four times a day, lots of adobo which is half pork fat. So I wound up at between 78 and 84 kg. So what happens to all of that pork fat and a certain kind of way we tend to gain weight as we get older? It turns into filler throughout the muscle which we call fat. That is lighter than, less dense then, our general muscle tissue so that tends to change our buoyancy.
How do you survive on the ocean and on the beach? when I was a kid going to the beach our father taught us kids a very simple principle. If you hold your breath and let your body float on the top of the water with almost none of your body under the surface you will float and the waves will bring you into shore That is almost always true with a few exceptions. That rule saved me from drowning at Sandy Beach in Hawaii number of years ago. It took two hours to get back to the beach after I was completely worn out from fighting the current. But I remembered what my father taught me when I was a kid, I floated on the top of the waves and eventually made it to shore. The art of the save was in spending most of my time with air in my lungs so I would float. At that time I was 62 kg and if I had let the air out of my lungs I would have sunk.
Before I came back to Thailand a few months ago I was 84 kg. Through exercise and diet I’ve gotten down to 77 kg. But even with that diet it would be very difficult for me to die in the ocean. If I let all the air out of my lungs I still float due to the fat in my body being more buoyant than the water it displaces. The problem is when I go diving I have to put on more weights to get me back to neutral buoyancy than I did when I was 62 kg back in the 1990s.
So the moral of the story is if you diet too much and get back to your neutral buoyancy state you could risk death in the ocean. Hyperbole? Maybe, maybe not.