Thinking about weight gain and weight maintenance, things are not adding up for me.
During 30 years of often horrendous excess, I “only” gained an average of 5 lbs. per year. At 3500 calories per pound of body weight, that would total 17,500 calories. Or – an average of 335 calories per week. Wow – that seems so little to me. As in would I have actually stayed the same weight had I merely consumed 335 less calories per week?
“Excess” – a big day for me would be something like having 4 bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches, no lunch, and then 2 large pizzas for supper. Wouldn’t eat all the pizza at one sitting, but by 9 or 10 p.m. it would all be gone. That’s an 8000 to 8500 calorie day. Didn’t average that, but a “small” day would still usually feature 3000+ calories, often with an abominable amount of carbohydrates.
Normal digestion, normal metabolism, normal activity level for a non-working-out adult with a usually not-very-physical job. I know that as we gain weight, our resting metabolism usually burns more calories per day, but not nearly enough to account for what I’m thinking – that cutting out an average of 335 calories per week would have made no appreciable difference at all, rather than a constant weight being maintained. Seems to me that many, many calories must have been “wasted” somehow, and that they did not actually go into the bottom-line of my weight.
The same for maintaining my desired and hoped-for weight, should I get there. If it would only be a matter of taking in 335 calories less per week, that seems too easy. And the same for 500 calories or 1000 or 1500 per week. Fasting works almost perfectly for me and to just miss one day per week of eating is not a problem. That should take care of less calories per week, certainly up to 1500 or so. It feels like there must be more to it than that – as with the seemingly “slow” weight gain while eating very large numbers of calories per day – the equations are not making sense to me.
