Why is it, that you can eat a 2,000 calorie meal, and in theory, you shouldn’t need calories again until the next day, but you can be hungry again 6-8 hours after you finish eating? Is your body just not capable of actually processing that many calories?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

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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.