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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Something is fishy. How is it physically possible to eat 12,000 calories of cheese per day plus hamburgers and lose weight? Somebody here is lying.

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You could give yourself rabbit starvation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_toxicity

There should be enough fat in 12000 calories to avoid rabbit starvation. I did not consider the load of metabolizing all that protein and assumed the body would eliminate what it didn't need. They're might be something in protein toxicity here.

This is from lean protein, add fat and your body is okay. You need either fat, carbs, or both. But you can’t just run on protein.

I thought the same, but an open question for me (now) is what happens if you eat 3000 calories of protein and 3000 calories of fat or even carbohydrate. You have sufficient calories that your body doesn't need to metabolize protein for energy, but what happens to all the excess protein you consumed?

I assumed the excess protein would be undigested, but can't back that up with a citation.

If the ratio of fat to protein is high, and exogenous carbohydrates is relatively low in contrast, insulin levels should be closer to baseline (than a standard diet), as well as blood glucose, thereby keeping the Randle cycle minimized and so consumed energy gets used more by an on-demand basis or it gets dumped (literally). Part of the reason we poop is because, if our bodies literally used all of the mass we consume, we would either get too large in short order or spontaneously combust.

I don't think someone here is lying. There may be some level of exaggeration, as in my experience a lot of cheese (particularly hard cheeses) can lead to extremely painful stools, but calories really aren't as meaningful as one might assume, especially when switching from a diet that directly supplies carbohydrate and one that doesn't.

The human body needs a certain amount of glucose in the blood, but it can't get that from fats (at least as far as I am aware). It can obtain it from protein through a process called gluconeogenesis, but that's a relatively expensive process that requires more ATP than what ultimately results from it. The human body also treats that process in a more demand-driven manner than one where exogenous carbohydrates are consumed. This isn't an absolute, but it's generally less supply-driven. If protein can't be used for glucose or building tissue, it's more likely to become waste eventually.

See "rabbit starvation":

https://hekint.org/2022/01/26/rabbit-starvation-protein-pois...

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