Some commenters here are misinterpreting the headline/article -- the study does NOT say you won't gain weight!<p>It mainly just says your blood sugar won't spike, which is entirely expected ("managed to keep the amount of nutrients in the bloodstream within normal range"). Emphasis added:<p>> "Specifically, those tested in this study were able to efficiently use <i>or store</i> the nutrients they ingested during the pizza-eating challenge, such that the levels of sugar and fats in their blood were not much higher than when they ate half as much food. The main problem with overeating is that it <i>adds more stored energy to our bodies (in the form of fat)</i>..."<p>This just confirms the conventional understanding of how our bodies work. The raised insulin levels quickly convert excess blood sugar into glycogen and fat.<p>A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this headline as meaning you won't gain weight from a single meal. This study does NOT support that conclusion!
N = 14<p><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-nutrition/article/physiological-responses-to-maximal-eating-in-men/25C29D75CB1553B9D3D23E276295A4D8" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...</a>
> Hormones that are released by the gut
to stimulate insulin secretion and increase
feelings of fullness were changed the most by
overeating (e.g. GLP-1 and peptide YY).<p>I wonder if people who chronically overeat (hello!) develop insensitivity to these hormones, leading to a cycle where it becomes harder to eat the correct amount. Similarly, I wonder if people who tend to eat too little are hyper-sensitive to them, making it hard to gain weight.
You can also find this anecdotally by talking to competitive eaters. They will almost all tell you that as long as you eat a regular amount of calories most days they have no problem with weight gain from binge eating once or twice a week. AKA there is there is a difference between eating 2000 calories 6 days a week and 6000 one day than eating 2500 calories 7 days a week.
It shouldn't be terribly surprising that we do OK with "feast and famine", especially if you're young. I remember being 16 and eating an entire large NY pizza for an afternoon snack before dinner...<p>I assert without proof that it's the all-feast-all-the-time dietary novelty for most of humanity in the last, oh, 200 years that probably throws a spanner in the works.
"The researchers acknowledge that their study involved healthy young men, so they plan to investigate whether similar effects are apparent in women, and for overweight and older populations."
It's called homeostasis. This is the reason why it's hard to lose weight and keep it off. Your body has "set points" that it creates, and it takes a consistent effort to push your body off of that set point and dig a groove into a different one.
Body can only consume X amount of calories from the food you eat every day (just like any other process/machine it has its upper limit), and the rest will be thrown out without being digested. That's why short bursts of high calorie intake won't result anything more than the X amount. However reaching that upper limit everyday will add up to weight gain.
> Four hours after eating maximally, the participants [...] reported no desire to eat anything else, including sweet foods. This was surprising because reward centres in the brain are usually food specific, so eating pizza might not be expected to change the desire for sweet food.<p>No it's not surprising because - whether it's contrary or not the neurodrivel "reward centres in the brain" i'm not sure - as an adult you know that craving for a specific food item is entirely a high-level construction in your psychology to do with the story you're telling yourself about what it will mean to eat that, etc. and you should have experienced that it will go away as soon as you eat enough of anything else.
Is this really that interesting? Overeating doesn’t appear to affect blood sugar beyond regular eating in healthy adults - seems normal to me. Lipids didn’t spike after a single meal - also seems normal. All they found is that these are linear up to the point of satiety and then the body’s hormones keep levels in check beyond that.
I have AYCE sushi scheduled monthly as part of lifting routine, and notice overcompensation that day has no real long term consequences. Body will either eat less or shit more in the following days. I track calories as well and will definitely end the week with AYCE surplus, which never makes it to scale weight.
So are "one-off calorie indulgences" okay because they're smaller in scale than long term over eating, or because they're not frequent? In other words, is eating 3000 more calories for one meal, once per month worse/better/equal for you than eating 100 more calories every day?
This makes sense to me since early humans hunted large game. Also, feasting seems to be present in some form in almost all human cultures. If it really were harmful, I would expect some cultures to have figured that out.
No surprise, TBH. For thousands of years prehistoric humans didn't eat similarly sized meals N times a day every day. They ate whenever and whatever they could hunt/catch. Which means huge meals after days/weeks of hunger only to have days/weeks of hunger again. No wonder our bodies are well adapted to such irregularities.
Only twice as much? I'm quite surprised, when I used to go to AYCE buffets I could easily push it to 3-4 times to make it worth the money, twice as much would not be worth the money.
This was a big thing with Tim Ferris when he was making an argument for "cheat days". Personally, I also found cheat days to be effective when on a restrictive diet. I think he ended up actually weighing his poop to prove the point.<p>I did notice that I couldn't breakthrough some key weight loss levels without both cheat days and intermittent fasting, with the cheat days seeming counter-intuitive to me.