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Comment by fatdog789 | Hacker News Reader

How in the hell do you eat 6000 calories a day? That's the equivalent of 6 double-patty burgers, plus 3 large fries and a 3 large sodas, at most fast food restaurants.

You burn roughly 10 x (your weight in pounds) calories at rest, plus an additional 10% (of that number) for each activity level (office/couch potato = 10%, moderate exercise 4 times a week/average (1 hour each session) = 20%, strenuous exercise 4 times a week/average = 30%, dedicated athlete = 40%. The percentages increase with muscle mass, but not by much. These numbers are for base calorie burn; calories actually expended through physical activity are in addition to these numbers.

Hell, you'd have to be an Olympic or professional athlete to come even close to needing more than 5000 calories in a single day.

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"Hell, you'd have to be an Olympic or professional athlete to come even close to needing more than 5000 calories in a single day."

Here is the short article about Michael Phelps and his diet. Supposedly he eats 12K calories per day. http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/blog/fourth_place_m...

An ultra-maraphon runner Dean Karnazes provided a sample diet for a day when he runs for the whole 24hrs in his book. I think it was about 26K calories.

These are the extremes, of course, but not impossible.

Yes, but he claimed that 6-8000 calories per day was "easy" to kind of just happen. It is not, unless the ease refers to indeed going to McDonalds three times a day plus a "snack" of french fries and a milkshake inbetween.

Phelps proves a point, though: so long as one uses the calories, there is no weight gain from fat.

How in the hell do you eat 6000 calories a day? That's the equivalent of 6 double-patty burgers, plus 3 large fries and a 3 large sodas, at most fast food restaurants.

Well, we stipulated three meals and snacking, and you've accounted for it already with just the meals! Say you also like potato chips and dip, and want to eat a bag of chips with a can of dip between lunch and dinner, and then after dinner. If that's all the snacking you do, you've added another 4500-5000 calories just in snacks.

Could you sit down tomorrow and eat all that? Of course, you probably couldn't, if you don't eat nearly that much now. But it's not hard to get there if you start eating because you're bored, or because you want to make yourself feel better, or whatever. Over the weeks or months, "I'll just have a little more this time so that eating lasts longer and is more enjoyable" pushes the amounts up until the calorie counts here seem only excessive, rather than completely bizarre.

That's only 666 grams of fat, right? That's a pound and a half of fat. If you mix that with a pound and a half of something else, you can probably keep it down, no problem. Eating three pounds of food in a day is easy. That's like a 1.5ℓ bottle of water, in volume.

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