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> That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight.

Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0]

That's exactly the point the grandparent comment was making though. Because they aren't chronically eating at competition levels is the reason they aren't overweight. They have a high calorie moment, followed by low calorie stretches.

That wasn't my takeaway from that comment.

> Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic.

Suggests that your metabolism is changing, as though your body becomes more or less efficient at burning calories because you're eating more or less. Instead, these guys eat a huge surplus of calories and then go into a deficit to get back to their standard weight.

Sure he cuts back his calories, but 70 hotdogs is about 21k calories. I don't think he goes into a 21k calorie deficit over the next few weeks. That's an insane deficit. That would be the equivalent of not eating for 8.5 days, which is not possible since it would mess with his training. He probably cuts it back some fraction of that, say 10k and his body's increased metabolism adjusts for the rest.

It would be interesting to know what amount of the calories from the 70 hot dogs is actually absorbed, versus how much is excreted without being absorbed.

Your body is not converting all 21k calories to fat in an event like that. There are many physiological limits to caloric conversion to fat.

I'm not exactly sure what their bodies are doing, but I guarantee you my body would get rid of that food extremely quickly before it was fully digested.

A 21K deficit over 3 weeks would be 1000 Cal/day of deficit. For comparison, this is the amount of deficit required to lose 2 pounds per week, which many people do.

Isn't there a limit to how many calories your body can store in a certain period of time? After a certain point wont there be a lot of waste?

Doesn't that beg the question of why anyone gets fat if your metabolism can just... increase to cover some arbitrary amount of calories?

It's because our bodies want to get fat, because storing calories is evolutionarily advantageous (or at least was).

> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.

Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.

Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.

Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.

Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.

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1. From Renaissance Periodization

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value

In addition to food being much tastier than ever before, it’s also much cheaper. Despite current inflation and cost of living concerns, we spend far less on food than any time in history. Food in the 1960 was almost twice as expensive as it is today. Food costs used to be higher than housing costs!

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

Interesting - training for spikiness/variability is a positive view, e.g. embrace the lack of occasional sleep, it trains you to be more resilient.

This is built into a lot of religions and cultural practices with fasting or restrictions. Spikiness is lindy

Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As with all things, it is a balance.

Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.

Some do this, some go on binge fast cycles. Others just eat the food. It's different for everyone. Binge fast cycles are probably the easiest way to train this though.