Maximum caloric processing in 24 hours???

MrCourter

This may seem like an "ignorant" question but, from all the reading I have done, I think there is some validity to this question. However, it seems that opinions vary on this topic and I would really love to know what a member of the medical community would have to say about this...

My wife and I are very careful about what we eat 6 days a week. However, on Saturdays, we have what we call a "free day" meal that is not as restrictive. We realize that in some ways this may be a little self-defeating...but...it's how we motivate ourselves to make it through the other 6 days of being really good.

I started to wonder..."Is there a maximum number of calories the body can process before calories over that amount are not really broken down and digested?"

In other words, since most say that roughly 3,500 calories processed by the body equals 1 pound of body fat, what would happen (hypothetically) if you consumed, say, 35,000 calories in a day??? Surely you could not PHYSICALLY process that many calories in a day and gain 10 pounds instantly! There MUST be a biological limit as to the number of calories that can be converted into fat in a given time.

So, during our "free day" if I were to go nuts and eat 10,000 calories, 50,000 calories, 100,000 calories (lets say...literally eating bags of sugar) or even more...would the actual weight gain correspond equally to the calories consumed...or...would my body just stop processing calories at a certain point and allow the rest to "pass" undigested by the enzymes that help us breakdown food and store fat?

Just a curiosity of mine...

Christopher

stephgetsfit2

Hmm ive never thought about that! Now i'm curious too!

stevencloser

Well firstly, until you go to the toilet your weight will definitely be increased by how much the food weighed.
The food will stay in your body and your body will digest it and use up whatever energy it needs. Taking aside the physical limitations of your stomach holding 100k calories of food, it would slowly digest all of it eventually.
Know when you eat somethingand you feel really full for a long time and with other things you will feel like you haven't eaten anything to begin with? Kinda like that. It'd just take longer to digest completely because of the sheer amount of food, but it will digest and take out energy while it's going through you.
So no, you won't be pooping out grains of sugar undigested.

MrCourter

Of course I didn't think that "undigested" food would exit my body. However, I was wondering if the chemical and biological process of breaking down and storing fat is limited to a maximum caloric intake for a 24 hour period.

kuolo

I think quite a lot of it would exit your body undigested. I know binge eating can cause this to happen. So there probably is a physical limit especially if it is one a week, ie your digestive system is getting a massive shock. I have no idea about the biochemical limits. Maybe you could try it out and see what happens?! But I suspect the digestive system is the limiting factor tbh.

Unknown

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rockmama72

I'm not sure what this says about me, but reading this post made me Google "animals that eat until they explode."

parkscs

I don't know that there's much research out there on the subject (hard to get people to eat 20,000 calories a day), but I suspect there is certainly a daily limit. Look at some of the competitive eaters out there that stay lean - Furious Pete on Youtube comes to mind as a good example since he's a bodybuilder as well. He eats crazy amounts of food for eating competitions but he generally restricts that to ~one day/week. Were he to eat massive portions like that on a daily basis, I'm pretty sure he'd turn into fat and furious Pete, but he actually stays quite lean even though he consumes insane amounts of calories on a regular basis. All that said though, I don't know that you'll find a definitive answer to this question.

wisteriafleur

Due to the uniqueness that is our bodies if there were a maximum caloric processing that occurred then it would be independently determined based on each individual. That is to say there would be a general "average" of course but no constant unchanging value

Consider that people have different reactions to medications due to their unique biochemistry which is developed through a series of factors such as inheritance from parents, Development of resistance and generally just being special like everyone is.

Id say at some point your body would start to slow down in breaking up the food in an attempt to stop the body from going into shock and just hold the food and then you would be stuck with a "stuff to bursting" feeling.

Again though that would be IF we could eat that much without blowing out our stomachs like tires on a hot summer day
Wish I had the answer though because then it would maximize weight loss for everyone


I found a post on the same subject. the OP posts the same question with some pretty insightful comments from other users

http://caloriecount.about.com/forums/weight-loss/maximum-calorie-intake-body-handle