taikne wrote:
One pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. This is the amount of excess calories you'd have to eat to put on one pound.
Convieniently, if you round the number of days in a year to 350, you would have to eat 10 extra calories per day to put on one pound in a year. 100 per day for 10 pounds, 1000 per day for 100 pounds, etc. And that leaves you 15 extra spare days just incase you miss some, eh?
It also works out such that each 500 extra calories you eat per day will work out to an extra pound per week. So if you eat 2000 extra calories each day for seven days you'll gain four pounds that week.
The more you weigh, the more you must eat in order to maintain your weight. For a very very rough formula, the amount you need to maintain your weight is approximately your weight in pounds times ten, plus an amount of calories equivalent to your activity level.
Using me for example, it would be 130 lbs times 10 = 1300 calories, plus between 500 and 1000 calories for activity. If I don't do much heavy work I'd need around 1800 calories, if I'm throwing hay and shearing sheep I'd need around 2300. A 250 pound person would need about 3000 for a slow day and 3500 for a busy day. (Can anyone verify this? I realise this is just a very rough formula, just a rule of thumb for estimations, but this is still allot of guesswork. If there are any heavier people here who keep close tract of their calories could they please post approximately how much they need to maintain their weight so we can see if my theory bears out?)
An alternate way to look at it is like this: your body adapts to the lifestyle you are living. If you want to be 300 pounds, live the lifestyle of a 300 pound person, or vice versa. If you want to be able to lift 200 pounds, live the lifestyle of the sort of person who can, and your body will adapt to it, and so on. You can't just expect to eat a bunch extra for a few months and then return to the exact same lifestyle you had before and maintain all that weight.
Interestingly, I think that the time it would take for your body to adapt to a new lifestyle is approximately one year, assuming perfect conditions. So if a 150 pound person started eating like a 300 pound person and eating 3500 calories a day they would start by putting on three pounds a week, and end the year being at maintainence. This is speculation though.
Note that if you are consistantly consuming much more energy than your body needs for maintainance it will often start not absorbing energy it does not need. You can reset this by fasting for a day or two periodically.
A tip for those starting out; one possible method for making sure you're meeting your goal calories per day is by breakig it up per hour. Say make a goal to eat 300 calories per hour, for ten hours. Most people are up 16 hours a day so that gives you 6 hours to be slack on, and 300 an hour is a small very reasonable amount. That comes to 3000 calories a day and is an easy simple regimen to keep up with.
People of morbidly obese BMI have on average a stomach capacity approximately twice that of people of average BMI.
For those just starting to gain, this may be one of the largest hurdles, since stomach capacity is very closely related to both feelings of fullness, satiety, and hunger. It is my guess that this is the reason why people who've started gaining start feeling like they're constantly hungry all the time after several months, because their stomaches have stretched out considerably.
You can expand your stomach capacity by swallowing air well beyond fullness, until the pressure inside is high enough that if you try to swallow more air the air comes back out faster than you can swallow it. Hold the air in for atleast one minute before letting yourself burp it all. Make sure you have atleast some food in your stomach before you try this even if you're not stuffed, because otherwise the air will just go down into your intestines and not help stretch your stomach at all.
I did this several times a day for one week and was amazed out how much larger my stomach capacity was at the end of the week. Unfortunantly I was very busy and couldn't afford to stuff myself reguliarly after that, and my stomach fairly quickly returned to normal capacity for me, over several months of nothing but small meals.
These are just a couple of random ideas I've had over the years, not sure if they'll be of help to anyone else. Please add all your own random ideas like this to the thread, too. Let's make something of a compendium?
wow that was really an interesting insight ;-)
you really wrote a lot ;-) seems you really deal with this topic very often .....-)
