How many calories does one have to eat in a day to maintain being 600+ lbs, and how is it that your body doesn’t just burn it off as your metabolism speeds up?
In: Biology
1) Maintaining weight above 600lbs is painfully easy for some people. Often, I don’t find their diet much different to my own!
However, genetics and health conditions can play a large role! Example, there is an indian tribe that tends to put on weight for the winter, despite all the modern conveniences of home these days! Evolution can often backfire with rapid changes. Additionally, daily work and habits plays a role. Such as an office or desk job compared with many Construction and Maintenance jobs. Also should consider any extra walking, fidgeting, or exercise to burn more energy and keep in shape.
In the end, being bigger can burn more calories due to simply moving that weight around and maintaining. However, it also can have a tendency to naturally store extra energy or some deeper health issue that makes it much harder to use it efficiently.
2) The body is very practical in its use of energy. It uses the easiest fast sources first, such as what’s already stored up, are muscles, and what’s currently available from our digestive system. Fat is unfortunately much harder to convert into energy, and even with lots of effort. It can remain partially as a reminder that you were once bigger. Which makes liposuction appealing for the many affected by bad genetics and sometimes just poor decisions catching up to them as adults.
Links
* [health.gov – 2020 dietary guidelines](https://health.gov/our-work/food-nutrition/2015-2020-dietary-guidelines/guidelines/appendix-2/) – Men: 2,000-3,000, Women: 1,600 – 2,400
* [Genetics and Nutrition](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218767/) – Different tastes leads to different diets
What you’re referring to is a BMR or ‘basal metabolic rate’. It is a value that describes the calories requires to maintain weight if you are sedentary.
You can Google a BMR calculator and plug various numbers into it.
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>how many kcal does one have to eat in a day to maintain being 600lbs
Given a 30 year old male, 5’9, sedentary job, roughly 4,406 kcal.
Female, same weight, 5’4′, roughly 4,112 kcal.
>and how is it that your body doesn’t just burn it off as your metabolism speeds up
Your metabolic rate is divided into two categories. What your rate of metabolized energy is for existing without movements(maintaining basic homoeostasis) and then adding in movement. The base cost increases the more cells you have, including fat cells. The active cost differs between sleeping and running up stairs.
So the people that claim they’re skinny because they have a fast metabolism are misunderstanding that part. The more fat cells, the higher your metabolic demands of energy. Its not a genetic lottery system.
Conversely; the people claiming weight loss efforts are somehow futile because your metabolic rate decreases as you lose fat cells aren’t regonizing what the ‘rate of metabolized energy’ means.
But even as it increases, the input energy can match the output and no weight loss or gain occurs. If you’re asking why doesn’t the body just increase output infinitely, its because there was no demand for it to do so.
And active efforts to lose weight(increasing output) meets [incredible resistance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXTiiz99p9o) vs reducing inputs.
Weight gain and weight loss are a simple factor of how much you consume vs how much you expend.
We require a baseline of calories each day to keep us alive. A consistent consumption above that will result in weight gain. A consistent consumption below that will result in weight loss.
A 600lb person may not have a much higher baseline consumption than a 100lb person. The real questions are “how much over my baseline needs have I consumed a day?” And “how long have I been over consuming?”
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