Let’s suppose I usually eat exactly the right number of kilojoules for my weight and activity level so that my weight never fluctuates at all. Come Christmas Day, I overeat +++ and my weight the next morning has gone up by 2kg. If I cut back my intake on Boxing Day and for a couple of days afterwards, the 2 kg is lost but what if I just go back to eating what I eat every other day?
Part of the 2kg gain is just the weight of all the actual food but if I don’t cut back, it becomes part of an enlarged me. How many hours/days can I carry the extra kilojoules around, either as elevated blood sugar or glycogen before it turns into fat?
Intuitively your body would convert the excess calories to fat within a few hours; basically by the time you eat your next meal (add more calories to your system) the extra from the previous intake would need to be stored somewhere or your blood sugar would get too concentrated. Your muscles and liver can only hold so much glycogen, and since your calorie intake/expenditure in this example is equal, you’d think that storage system would be perpetually full. Your body should be processing/converting/storing nutrients (and eliminating waste products) at roughly the same rate you put food into it otherwise you’d get a back-log of something and die.
