How many surplus calories can you absorb in 24hrs

[Dustin07]

This feels like a painfully stupid question but:

If you're baseline is say, 2500 calories and you consume 10,000 calories tomorrow (7k presumably containing tryptophan lol) then what percentage of that surplus will your body actually retain (for muscle, fat or whatever)?

There must be studies on it right? But I can't fathom that eating say 7k calories excess in one day would truly lead to a combined increase of 2lbs worth of muscle and/or fat. if if it's 10/90%.

Maybe I'm wrong. it's not a question I've ever had before so I'm tossing it to the internet to decide.

 

[Resolve10]

It is a little bit of a complicated question and there are going to be a ton of variables that go into it, but keeping it super simple you would "absorb" all of what you intake yet the body is crazy and will probably upregulate things in a few ways.

You can see in an example here you can see that there is an increase in BMR and the researchers concluded the rest of the increase of energy expenditure was through thermic effect of food and activity.

In the example of an additional 7,000 calories you'd have to keep in mind that (depending on content) there would also be a certain amount of TEF for those calories which will lower their "impact" from the get go.

Then every individual will have a different response to increase intake with some having larger increases in NEAT that will impact this intake.

The content of the overfeeding will effect the amount as well. One example like this show a greater amount of storage with fat versus carb and protein overfeeding made some waves in recent years with studies showing very minimal storage like this one.

So not all of that hypothetical 7000 would end up being stored, as you can see it kind of has slowly been chipped away. I'm fading as I type this and don't want to keep linking too much because I don't have it on hand, but pretty sure there are a few interesting studies on large overfeedings showing some big water surpluses but not a ton of tissue accrual in very short term scenarios (maybe wrong as again I don't seem to have the study(ies) on hand).

So ya interesting stuff and an interesting question. I think MY OPINION based on what I've seen is singular very large increases in intake probably aren't massively detrimental (but probably will have a minor impact) and that the real driver of fat gain will be a sustained high intake.

 

[Dustin07]

That's more or less what I have gathered as well, I mean refeeds are a thing, as is reverse dieting and on the other side, fasting. Since my long term plan is to be leaning up about 5% bf from where I am (regardless of scale weight) my plan is to allow a small surplus today but I'll be aware of intake. Food will probably be almost dead nuts on to normal but I'll likely snag an extra 500-1000 calories of bourbon