{"id":38556,"date":"2019-06-21T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38556"},"modified":"2019-06-20T08:08:54","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T12:08:54","slug":"qotd-caloric-intake-and-weight-gain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/06\/21\/qotd-caloric-intake-and-weight-gain\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Caloric intake and weight gain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The average person needs about 800,000 calories per year. And it takes about 3,500 extra calories to gain a pound of weight. So if somebody stays about the same weight for a year, it means they fulfilled their 800,000 calorie requirement to within a tolerance of 3,500 calories, ie they were able to match their food intake to their caloric needs with 99.5% accuracy.<\/p>\n

By this measure, even people who gain five or ten pounds a year are doing remarkably well, falling short of perfection by only a few percent. It’s not quite<\/em> true that someone who gains five pounds is ((5*3,500)\/800,000) = 98% accurate, because each pound you gain increases caloric requirements in a negative feedback loop, but it’s somewhere along those lines.<\/p>\n

Take a second to think about that. Can you, armed with your FitBit and nutritional labeling information, accurately calculate how many calories you burn in a given day, and decide what amount of food you need to eat to compensate for it, within 10%? I think even the most obsessive personal trainer would consider that a tall order. But even the worst overeaters are subconsciously managing that all the time. However many double bacon cheeseburgers they appear to be eating in a single sitting, over the long term their body is going to do some kind of magic to get them to within a few percent of the calorie intake they need.<\/p>\n

It’s not surprising that people overeat, it’s surprising that people don’t overeat much more<\/em>. Consider someone who just has bad impulse control and so eats whatever they see \u2013 wouldn’t we expect them to deviate from ideal calorie input by more than a few percent, given that this person probably has no idea what their ideal input even is and maybe has never heard of calories?<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2017-04-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The average person needs about 800,000 calories per year. And it takes about 3,500 extra calories to gain a pound of weight. So if somebody stays about the same weight for a year, it means they fulfilled their 800,000 calorie requirement to within a tolerance of 3,500 calories, ie they were able to match their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,66,41,16],"tags":[713,150,290],"class_list":["post-38556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health-science","category-quotations","category-science","tag-biology","tag-obesity","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a1S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38556"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49080,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38556\/revisions\/49080"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}