By ‘weight gain’ I mean weight that would be retained once the food/liquid has passed. So muscle mass and fat gained.
(Simplified) The upper threshold of weightloss is calories in calories out. If I eat nothing in a day I will lose the amount of weight my body burned. Approx 3500cal/lbs.
What is the upper threshold of weight gain? I presume my body can only produce so much muscle and store so much fat in a given time period. If I managed to stuff 35,000 calories down my gullet, I wouldn’t gain 10lbs. Most of it would pass unused.
In: Biology
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So you are correct, in that even if you were to stuff twenty pounds of food in you, you would not gain twenty pounds. As to how much you can gain depends on a variety of factors such as sex, age, gut health, physical size of your intestines, the type of food you’re eating, and your metabolism. Because of all these factors, it’s hard to pin down an exact number. However, from what evidence we do have, it appears that the human body maxes out at gaining more than five pounds per day. And even that is not sustainable, but more of a one off thing.
How many ball bearings do you think you can swallow in one sitting?
Are you talking about a one-off ‘back to fighting weight’ sort of gain? If so are you starting from a fully depleted state? I’d think that with medical grade rehydration techniques you could probably put on 10-15 pounds in a day and hold onto it for a while, but that’s after drying way out so you’re really just putting that all back.
Somebody please eat as much as they can possibly hold and then do nothing for the next few days. For science.
The biology of weight is insanely complicated. If we ignore water weight, it’s a twisted nest of feedback loops designed to keep weight at a particular set point. So, even with the exact same diet, every person will react differently.
And as you guessed, not all calories are equal. You overload with fat, you’ll just crap it out. You take in the wrong mix of proteins (like a ton of collagen) you’ll pee it out. You take in too many carbs, you’ll probably pee those out too.
Little brother had a professional MMA fight, missed weight, had to be 146 but weighed in at 146.8. This was 10:00am Friday morning, by Saturday at 7pm he stepped on the scale at 184lbs. So under extreme circumstances close to 40 lbs..
In one of my Guinness book of world records, one of the fattest men in reportedly gained 200lbs in seven days
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