I just hand a friend ask me:
What is the most weight one adult human can gain in 24 hours?
My google-fu is failing me.
We’re talking organic weight, so putting on really big dangly earrings doesn’t count…
A long time ago, there was this site called thespark.com that had a lot of funny projects that the founders would do. Well apparently they have moved all of their stuff to OKCupid.com I am guessing that is their new site? Anyway, they had one project called the fat project.
http://www.okcupid.com/humor/fat-project-home.html
Essentially they took two people and tried to get them as fat as possible over the course of a month. Not exactly science but the best they could do was about a pound a day.
I can’t answer the question, but I also cannot resist to mention that there’s a wonderful Carl Barks comic in which, by intrigues masterminded by an Indian maharaja, Donald Duck becomes ruler of the intrigant’s neighboring state. It turns out that there’s a law in the state which says that the ruler must reach a given weight during an annual weighing ceremony (which, incidentally, also determines the amount due to the intrigant maharajah as repayment of debt); if he’s not heavy enough, the ruler becomes food for the tigers. Of course Donals fails the test, in spite of his nephews’ attempts to make him gain last minute weight.
The day I delivered my son, I went in to the hospital at 171 pounds. He was a 6 pound, 3 ounce baby. One assumes the placenta and amniotic fluid also has mass of some sort (most baby books say that the “other stuff” weighs about the same as the baby.) I was there for ~48 hours, and came home weighing…171 pounds. (On the same scale.)
According to my doctor, this is a medical impossibility. So…I dunno, exactly. It was seem that according to medicine, ~12 pounds of weight gain in two days is impossible. According to my body, it’s possible, and while eating hospital food, no less. I stayed pretty much at that weight for the next 10 years, so it wasn’t temporary water weight or anything.
The hardest thing to account for will be the weight of the food in your GI tract - false “weight” versus a gain in fat and muscle tissue. From doing Weight Watchers for the past 6 months, I can tell you that a hearty meal will make your weigh-in a nightmare to the tune of 2 or more pounds of extra weight that will go away the next time you defecate.
Eater X Ate 20 pounds of food last Thanksgiving, so the answer is at least 20 pounds, right?
Actual weight, as opposed to a big hunk of food in your tummy? When I was a senior in high school, I gained 17 pounds in 14 days when our wresting coach didn’t make us weigh in for two weeks during Christmas break. It hasn’t gone away since.
Santo,
Actual weight.
The individual is curious as to how bad they could screw up their diet by going off of it in grand fashion for a day. “Going off of it” probably means a trip to Macaroni Grill, some Ferero Rocher [sp] chocolates and 3 scoops of ice cream.
That’s a different question. 3500 calories equals one pound. Add up the calories in that food, that’s the maximum you could gain.
Good point.
Basal metabolic rate for this sedentary morbidly obese subject is probably 2500ish calories… so 6000 calories to gain one pound. Hmmm.
Only with a perfectly efficient metabolism would this be true. In real weight loss scenarios excess calories over the baseline requirements to maintain your your weight are not all going to fat with anything approaching 100% efficiency.
For what it’s worth, Morgan Spurlock put on 24.5 pounds in 30 days during the filming of Super Size Me. I doubt that is even the record. Morgan was consuming 5000 calories a day. I saw some TV show where a morbidly obese guy was consuming 20,000(?) calories a day.
I think we’re saying the same thin, but I phrased it poorly. 1 pound for every 3500 calories is the most that could be theoretically gained, it’s an upper limit. You won’t actually gain that much.
Hmmm.
Makes some sense. I was running a solid 6-7000 calories per day some months back and never really seemed to break 360 lbs…