Since it's relatively easy to eat 4000 kcal a day without trying (in fact, just by not trying to not do so), I can only imagine how much you must be eating. 6000 kcal? 8000?
I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day.
When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of lasagna or similar pasta. Lots of snacks throughout the day. The only days where I would say that I easily got enough calories were when I gave in to the temptation of a fast-food hamburger and milkshake. However, as long as I was cooking at home, it was quite a bit of work to keep up with the calories I needed.
Two racks of baby back ribs. Bam, 5k calories, and that's not even all of the food I could eat in one day.
Damn I love me some ribs.
Or nuts - a cup of peanut butter has 1500 calories. Doughnuts, pastries, cheesecake, pancakes... Hell, a beer. Have 2 beers a day, you've burned through a good 500 calories. Real cream in your coffee, real sugar in your drinks.
If you're burning serious calories, you don't get to eat prissy. Look at what they eat in Antarctica.
> Two racks of baby back ribs. Bam, 5k calories, and that's not even all of the food I could eat in one day
I'm not sure how you figure that's 5000 calories. While there's undoubtedly some variation, it would appear that's more in the range of 2-3000 calories.
> On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal).
That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast.
When I'm trying to lose, I do low carb or intermittent fasting, or both. But if I'm not paying any attention, my diet might typically be three meals and some snacking: an cheese and bacon omelet with coffee for breakfast, a 4oz bag of avocado-oil kettle chips and plate of rice and chicken curry for lunch, a quart of chicken lo mein and three spring rolls for dinner. The snacks might something like 10-12 double-stuf Oreos, or a pint of peanuts, munched on over the course of an hour or so.
It's really easy to exceed 4000 kcal, and not hard at all to exceed 5000 kcal, all without ever feeling too full (or ever feeling hungry, of course...).
Interesting. Honestly, the sheer volume of food you're talking about would be challenging for me to ingest. A _quart_ of chicken lo mein? A _pint_ of peanuts? I'd consider a handful (2-4 tablespoons) of peanuts to be a normal snack.
This is an interesting lesson in the effect of food choices, I suppose. Because, my experience is that as long as I avoid soda and beer, it's really easy to consume <1500kcal a day, also without feeling hungry.
> That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast.
No, I really mean that I ate 3-4 times every morning. I was working from home at the time, though, so it made it much easier to prepare multiple breakfasts while stuff was compiling :-)
It's relatively easy to eat 4000 without trying? How many meals do you consume a day and what do they consist of?
When I did weight resistance training in tandem with intense cardio training five days a week it was still difficult to reach my needed caloric content (which hovered more or less around 4000).
I mean, I'm not saying you're lying, but how is it easy for you?
What do you eat? Eat more butter. More olive oil. More nuts.
A cup of peanuts has 800 calories.
Hell, eat meat - a rack of ribs has 2500 calories. Something akin to that every evening, with a couple beers and some broccoli and cheese, heavy on the cheese, is 4000 calories in one meal.
There are burritos at Chipotle that have 2k calories for one burrito.
As a fatass rather than an athlete, trust me, it's just a matter of training. A pint of Ben and Jerry's is over 1200. A large milkshake approaches 1000. A liter of Coke is 4 calories and two of those per day is doable. Now you're at 4000 calories without even a bite of real food!
The physiological satiety response just isn't as strong or effective in some people. To further complicate things, once obesity sets in, it creates a degree of insulin & leptin resistance, and losing control of these signalling devices even further reduces the negative feedback available to establish a hunger / eating cycle, when ad libitum food is available.
To some degree, it takes acts of deliberate control several times a day, for years, for people who are biochemically prone to overeating, to eat a normal amount given a Western diet... on top of their actual psychological habits.
Aside from this, an obese person deals with larger caloric maintenance requirements in the first place, and views the world through the same hunger-tinted glasses that everyone else does when eating below these requirements in order to lose weight.
A Chipotle burrito with guac & sour cream, and a side of chips, with a 32oz root beer (& 1 refill), will run you about 2400 calories, and represents the approximate amount that in a past era, I was able to eat before getting a subtle, non-painful signal to slow down. Alternately: a normal bag of double stuff Oreos, 2100 calories, 2500 with a decent amount of milk. Nacho Cheese Doritos Family Size: 2400 calories, or 3200 with a 2L of Coke. Digiorno Rising Crust Pizza: 2100 calories, or 2900 with a 2L of coke.
I'm way below my peak weight, but somewhat horrified that this kind of binging isn't out of the question, in the heat of the moment. I'm taking it one day at a time, counting calories, trying to eat small portions, and I've completely removed 'snack foods' and soda & fruit juice from my diet... but it's not easy, and if I don't focus on how much I'm eating, a single meal can destroy a week's worth of dieting.
And for a person who is genuinely hungry? The fastest I've ever lost weight was three weeks in my teens where I had a very controlled diet, and a strenuous 12hr/day backpacking activity. I shed 40lbs in 20 days and had significant related medical problems by the end of my term, so I feel this represents a reasonable approximation of 'starving' (although still at a relatively healthy weight). Midway through, a resupply opened up our food rations for return or immediate consumption. It turns out, 5lbs of cheddar cheese (9000 calories) goes down very easy; I was snacking on granola not an hour later. Stories of Holocaust survivors dying the day after rescue of GI problems aren't particularly surprising in light of a reality like that.
I've never been competitive about eating. I enjoy food, but I'm hardly that unusual: even at my peak weight, a solid 2% of the country had a higher BMI. The pathology is a function of our modern food system's emphasis on fat, sugar, and salt, our culture's value-for-money proposition of ever-increasing serving sizes, and differing physical susceptibility to these things on a personal level, not solely individual psychology. What's an absurd amount for you is the result of absentminded snacking for someone else.
Yes, this matches my experience, though I've lost more weight with fewer health problems: I once lost about 100 pounds in 3 months, but I was 19, and probably couldn't repeat that now at almost 40.
