I think the title kind of says it all, but I watched a video of someone eating a 2.1k calorie burger, and his friend said, good now you won’t need to eat for 24 hours and they laughed, then I thought, ” wait why is it that you would be hungry again after 6-8 or so hours, is our body that inefficient with those calories? Does this mean that when you eat over a certain limit of calories you body just puts the rest into waste and some into fat? How does it work?
Update: Wow thanks for all the upvotes, awards, and comments. I really appreciate all the new information and help on this topic.
In: Biology
The AH video where Jeremy eats the burger with Gavin?
Was the video you watched AH with Jeremy and Gavin?
one meal a day diets are popular. it works but you may need to re orient the body for a few weeks to burn more fats while resting.
if you have been eating multiple meals a day along with carbs in every meal you can’t expect your body to switch the metabolism in one day. it’s a process and lot of people do intermittent fasting and one meal a day diet notable figure is Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter
In general, your body doesn’t actually know how many calories you’ve consummed. How could it ? Until it’s fully digested there’s no way to know if what you are is eating premium steaks or cardboard. So it does it’s best estimate of how hungry you should be and how much food it can currently process.
Two interesting side-effects are that eating slowly will lead to eating less because there’s a delay between consuming food and the feeling of satiety. And eating something very sweet (such as desert) will increase the flexibility of you stomach and allow you eat more (the “there’s always room for desert” effect). That’s because in a wilderness situation, if you were lucky to find high-calorie foods that require little digestion, it was worth eating even if you were already full of roots and such.
Hunger is driven from hormones and Pavlov’s conditioning(sight – sizzling fats meat on a grill/smell – kfc smell /time – your usual meal times/place – favorite bar/cinema)
Energy/fat Storage is driven largely by the insulin hormone.
If you eat and insulin spikes, your body will attempt to store.
If you eat and there is little/no insulin, your body doesn’t store.
So if you don’t eat for a long enough time you can recondition some of your hunger signals.
Think of your body like a hybrid car that can run on two primary fuels.
1) The common glycogen (produced from carbohydrate and gluconeogenesis).
2) ketones (produced from burning fat dietary or stored)
If you eat enough carbohydrates, your body produces glycogen and fuels your body that way. Carbohydrates trigger insulin to be produced in the pancreas so you start storing away some of that energy.
If you don’t eat carbohydrates, your body is forced to switch to ketones.
If you don’t eat for a long enough time 48hours or so.
The glycogen within your body (liver) is reduced enough that you’re in ketosis (burning ketones instead of glycogen). Then there is very little insulin and glycogen in your system. Thereby burning/consuming fat (dietary or stored) to produce energy in the form of ketones.
This is why diabetic type 1 diabetics (can’t produce insulin) need insulin to survive and that if they don’t have exogenous insulin injected they’ll waste away into a skeleton no matter how much they eat.
This is also why fasting and the ketogenic diet (focusing on no/very low carb) works.
This also means you could eat a lot of calories by simply eating pork bellies and fatty salmon without really storing much(if you have a very low insulin environment.).
So calories don’t really count it’s the body’s insulin response that governs fat/energy storage.
I ate a 2k burger and was hungry after 3 hours. How do I go 8 hours? Would be nice…
r/omad (which apparently is now private, sorry) stands for One Meal A Day, and there are decent numbers of people that eat this way.
It just takes some getting used to for your body to adjust its eating and hunger cycle. It does actually work fairly quickly.
Hunger is only partially driven by how many calories we’re taking in. It’s also affected by things like how much stuff is in your stomach, which is why you get fuller faster if you’re drinking a lot of water with your meal
I think your question comes out of a misunderstanding of how efficient your body is and what calories are. The hunger you feel is mostly driven by literally how full you are and also other things like how much you think about food, how thirsty you are, how hard to digest the food you eat is.
When it comes to calories, the word represents an amount of energy we get out of food when digested. The way we find out how many calories a food has is we burn it and see how much heat is created. Calories are stored in the body in different ways but the vast majority of the excess is stores in fat cells.
When we eat a burger with 2000 Calories (kilocalories) we pretty much absorb all those calories. From the literature I’ve read, bodies are very efficient and pretty much absorb all the calories +/- 5%. The most inefficient bodies absorbing 5% less and the most efficiwnt absorbing 5% more. Obviously we can’t absorb more than the amount of Calories available so you can disregard the + if you know exactly what’s in the burger.
Now bodies are built to be able to store energy to use when food isn’t available so if we did not feel hunger outside of caloric need, we would be in trouble if food became scarce. Therefore, as soon as our bodies are physically able to accommodate food, we will feel hunger. That’s why people say you should have more fibrous food when on a diet. It’s because it takes longer to go through you, keeping you fuller longer.
There are some weird things that happen after you stay hungry chronically where you feel it less and less but I don’t have expertise in that so I’ll leave it for someone else.
Okay I’m going to explain this like you’re a high school student instead.
There are only certain sugars that your body can use for immediate energy use (glucose). Amylase and lipase are enzymes that break down polysaccharides into disaccharides which are then further broken down into glucose. Once all of your energy needs are satisfied your body will store the excessive glucose in your liver as glycogen and outside of liver as fat stores. Once all of your circulating glucose is depleted your body will release hormones like leptin and ghrelin to make your hungry and eat more for more readily available glucose. If you don’t eat when hungry but your body still needs energy it will dip into its glycogen stores first then into lipolysis and ketogenesis as glycogen stores ae depleted for energy.
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