After having shoveled 20 Toll House cookies down my throat earlier today, I happened to glance at the wrapper and soon realized I had eaten 2,000 calories in one sitting. (Whoops.)
This is particularly troubling since I ate pizza for lunch, so I’m up around 6,000 calories today. Not bad for a day’s work. I could eat more still, but I’ll quit before my heart does.
This got me thinking (and sickened). How many calories could a human eat in one day - max?
My opening guess would be about 20,000 calories if you go heavy on cookies, peanut butter, and fudge. After that your body might start to reject the mission. This is a WAG though - I suppose it could be much higher.
Looking forward to other, more well-informed Dopers’ responses.
Well, cooking oil and butter come in at about 120 Calories per tablespoon.
At 2 tablespoons per (US fluid) ounce, a 44-ounce Super Big Gulp, available at your neighborhood 7-Eleven store, would provide 10560 Calories if it were made entirely of oil or butter. How many of those could you drink in a day?
There’s that one Japanese guy who ate 50.5 hot dogs in just a few minutes. At 250 calories each that’s 12,625 calories. I searched Guinness Book of Records website and they don’t have an entry on that topic. I do suspect Diamond Jim Brady could eat a lot more than that though.
C’mom, everybody knows the king just had a slow metabolism.
Personally, I’m sure I’ve cracked 20,000 cals in a day. Some 750lb plus guys reported eating 50,000 a day when they could get a food runner and they had the money. Basiclly, their breakfast consisted of about six incredibly huge meals for a normal person, or 10-15000 cals…just by 9am.
Eat more calories than you burn, and you put on fat. But at what point can the body no longer store the calories you’re putting in? If Elvis was consuming 100,000 calories a day, and had put all the extra calories on as adipose tissue, he wouldn’t have been able to move.
I would hate to be Elvis’ plumber, that’s for sure.
That 100K calories a day is the highest I’ve heard. I know some body builders will eat 12-15K a day to add bulk. They usually do it by using high calorie supplements and such, not by eating junk. Sumo wrestlers eat 5000 per meal, at several meals per day.
Like Philster says, some of those very overweight people can hit 50k.
I suppose the limit is based on how much calorie dense food (like butter or oil) you could consume w/o throwing up. Anyone care to try?
TMI alert:
If you ingest so much food that you develop ‘the runs’, or vomitting, that is a sign that your are ingesting calories that you are not absorbing.
In other words, your body has forgone some of the absorbtion in favor of expelling everything as soon as possible. If you get diarhea, etc, because of the gastric issues from overconsumption, some amount of cals, nutrients and fluids are not absorbed. The intestines work overtime to expel the stuff - and this creates pain from the hunkering down, and nasty bathroom trips and you turn blue.
If you assume he burnt 3,000 calories a day, and that 1 lb. of body fat is worth about 3500 calories, then his 100,000 calorie/day diet would gain him about 28 pounds per day in excess body fat. That would seem to add up quickly.
Professional cyclists can eat over 10,000 calories per day when they are racing. When competing in a major tour such as the Vuelta a España or Tour de France (about 3 straight weeks of racing), then end up losing weight despite eating so much. Huge fat guys eating 50,000 calories per day are certainly at a highr limit, but who really wants to be like that? A 150 lb cyclist is a bit closer to most of us sizewise (I hope).
So go ahead and have more toll house cookies and another pizza. Just remember to ride about 120 miles a day to keep the weight off. Or plan on working as an Elvis impersonator. God knows we need more of them.
