Amazing list. Truly a work of art.
In particular, you did well to remember to put some liquids on there too. People often forget that they’re not just eating calories during the day but drinking them too. A two-liter bottle of coke would have something like 800 calories, I think. I have no idea about beer.
30,000 calories = 200 bottles (@ 12oz/ea) of Smithwick’s.
Better? 
According to this site you would need about 165 pints of bitter.
Thanks all. KarlGauss, I hope you do find time to come back and weigh in again.
I wondered the same thing myself. It’s really interesting to see what that 30,000+ calories would represent.
There does seem to be something about most people’s bodies to self control their weight. The NBA has been through the process. There was the case of the 7"4" player from BYU (Sean somebody) who had a lot of athletic ability but was a stick. They tried force feeding the guy until he was shitting foie gras and they still couldn’t significantly increase his bulk. He faded away with no impact on the league.
College football coaches try to get weight on their linemen (no comment on the fact that it may be detrimental to their health) and sometimes the guy just can’t bulk up.
If you put those 21 cups of butter in front of some people they will eat it. For most, it would be impossible no matter what reward you offered them.
Now consider the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. The guy’s that are winning and breaking all the records are skinny little guys. They consume a ton of calories on a regular basis as part of their training yet don’t have any fat. Go figger!
There does seem to be something about most people’s bodies to self control their weight. The NBA has been through the process. There was the case of the 7"4" player from BYU (Sean somebody) who had a lot of athletic ability but was a stick. They tried force feeding the guy until he was shitting foie gras and they still couldn’t significantly increase his bulk. He faded away with no impact on the league.
College football coaches try to get weight on their linemen (no comment on the fact that it may be detrimental to their health) and sometimes the guy just can’t bulk up.
If you put those 21 cups of butter in front of some people they will eat it. For most, it would be impossible no matter what reward you offered them.
Now consider the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. The guy’s that are winning and breaking all the records are skinny little guys. They consume a ton of calories on a regular basis as part of their training yet don’t have any fat. Go figger!
Not sure I agree with that - I put on just under 40% of my body weight (53lb) last year when I was in hospital. Admittedly I was on drugs that increase appetite and the food in my hospital was particularly stodgy, but I wasn’t eating THAT much. I put that on in less than six months and I’ve still not got all of it off yet.
Now that is a goal I can get my head 'round. Going to a wedding this weekend, I’ll give it a go!
I will report back to everyone on how far I get.
Shawn Bradley - AKA ‘The Mantis’.
You know, just reading this list you put together was more than enough to make me sick. There are actually people that consume the equivalent of that PER DAY? marathoners and long distance mountain bikers don’t even come close to that! :eek:
But how do they burn it off though? I understand the concepts behind the ring of fat theory that lacking fat around their stomach they are able to expand it further than fat people who do these contests, fine. But how do they manage to burn of the 20,000 or so calories that they consume? That one champion from Japan, a medical equipment salesman (forgot his name, sorry), isn’t a particularly extraordinairy athlete, definitely not a marathon runner. So how does he avoid absorbing all those calories?
There seems to be some misconception about what is really morbidly obese. Anyone who is only 100 lbs overweight is considered morbidly obese. People like Gilbert Grape’s mother are way way over that threshold.
I thought the Venus was a symbol of fertility, and meant to be a depiction of a pregnant woman?
“With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent.”
The important bit here is 4 months, vs over a period of say 5 or 10 years. It takes time to get used to overeating, it doesnt just happen in one day.
The link to the 33k+ calories is 4 people. Thats not a definitive statement of what your eating levels need to be to get to a BMI of 40+, or even 50+. I never got to a BMI of 40 but was probably 12 months off it when I stopped at 109kg, currently Im around BMI of 26, in my younger days I was generally viewed as way too skinny so Im not ‘naturally’ fat as far as I can tell, it was purely lifestyle/diet related where I got to, as well as staying in a particular professional area for longer than was sensible for me.
To get up there weightwise, it needs less overeating than youd think though, given you can pretty easily eat a days worth of calories in one meal at fast food store, coke is the 4 or 5 most common products at a supermarket, and an office job can result in less than 1000 steps a day.
I suspect a lot of overeating at that level is as much ‘need’ as ‘what the hell Im fat anyhow, might as well eat what I want when I want’, ie it becomes self reinforcing.
While you might eat that much when you’re up there, I also doubt you need to eat anywhere near that to get to a morbidly obese state, the calories over minimum has more to do with how fast it will happen, but Im sure at the other end it gets gated to some level by how much your body can even process it initially, the body can only lay down so much fat a day I suspect, and your bain takes time to see a given level of eating as ‘normal’. Gilbert Grape might need pathology but morbid obesity isnt as hard as you’d think in todays world.
I suspect if you looked at those prisoners after 5 years with something a bit less drastic and low activity they’d have had no problem getting up a fair way.
Otara
I hit that mid-20’s metabolism slowdown and went from about 100 pounds to 145 and stuck there. My body seems entirely uninclined to gain any extra weight, but losing what it put on is going to be hard as hell. I guess I just set up a “new normal”. (I’m 5’7" but very fine boned. I need less ass.)
Fortunately I’ve been able to exercise and diet off 24lb this year, I’m hoping to be back down to a normal weight (150lb) by October or so.
I used to work with a morbidly obese woman who did exactly the same thing. A shopping bag of food. And if anyone ordered pizza or Chinese food, she’d eat that too. But of course she attributed her weight to vitamin/mineral deficiencies, and would take supplements between bites of food.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she topped 30,000 calories.
Interesting discussion on the 30000+ calorie daily diets. I have done a lot of reading on Antarctic exploration, sledge pulling and such like. (Ranoulf Feinnes and Mike Stroud’s Antarctic crossing for example.) The figures normally quoted are that it is not generally possible to metabolise more than about 8000 calories per day. Anything more that that will just go straight through you if you ate it. Problem is that these guys pulling huge loads in extreme conditions may burn off 11000 calories per day. This puts them at 3000 calories daily deficit. Like it or not they are going to burn some body fat and lose condition. Part of the training for the expedition is to put on some fat and get used to large calorific intakes. I am sketchy on the exact figures, but I recall Feinnes saying that he lost something like 9 stone on the trip. That’s 125 pounds in 2½ months.
For the 30000 calorie eaters, assuming that they are actually able to digest a significant percentage of what they eat, they are going to stack on the weight very quickly. If a 3000 calorie daily deficit results in 125 pounds lost in under three months, then for argument’s sake, a 9000 calorie excess (actually metabolised) should result in a weight gain of triple that rate.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the fraction metabolised of these ultra high calorie diets is relatively low.
I remember watching one of the reality talk shows like Jerry Springer. It showed a 5 year old near 100 lbs (to compare, my 9 year old is tall for his age and is overweight and is 112 lbs). This kid ate more than me at 6’ 240 lbs. I couldn’t help thinking that there was something medically wrong with the kid like maybe the stomach never sent the “I’m full” signal. Second was “Why do they let him eat like that?”. Third was, “The kid needs to go to a doctor.”
Mrs. Cad’s weight had ballooned ever since her first pregnancy. There is a thread on it somewhere, but when you see her symptoms including massive weight loss while pregnant, you realize something ain’t right.
One thing to remember is that the bigger you are, the more energy you need to sustain itself. For example, if a healthy adult male burns around 2500 calories just existing, than a 500 pounder may burn around 10,000. (Just guessing; I have no idea of the actual numbers.) So a super-morbidly-obese person could probably lose weight by “cutting back” to, say, 5000 calories a day, at least for a while.
