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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

So you’re saying if I eat 500 extra calories per day (or about ten Oreos) I will gain 300 extra pounds, ending up at ~250% of my current body weight? While extra calories probably aren’t good, this doesn’t seem like a realistic model of the way the human body stores energy.

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Yes, assuming you always keep eating 500cal over your burn rate. Your body will adapt over time and try to burn more calories to compensate for some of that, some purely just by having additional fat, but you would continue to gain weight.

A 500cal surplus is quite a bit though, so if you set that you’d probably gain 20 lbs over time assuming you kept everything else equal.

There are feedback mechanisms so that if you consume extra, you will want to move extra to compensate, and your basal metabolism might even rise to burn a few more. They aren’t perfect though, and something seems to have broken them on a really large scale the last 50 years or so. At least that’s my current thinking.

If we're being pedantic, you'd need to eat 500 extra calories over your what your body burns daily.

But over a 6 year period, you would definitely accumulate 300 pounds of extra weight this way.

So the assumption here is that the pipeline for energy storage (including the human digestive system, insulin machinery and adipose tissue) converts calories to fat mass at a constant rate of efficiency, regardless of whether you're currently underweight, or at 350% of healthy bodyweight. Is there any human-built energy storage system that exhibits this type of performance? Do we really think that the human body exhibits it?

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