Not true at all, you weren't even counting your calories you're just throwing out a number. And if you were counting you were counting wrong. That's a huge part of people who say they can't gain or lose weight. They claim to eat these vast amount (or extremely low amount) of calories when they really have no idea. People trying to lose weight will look at a burger and say "that's about 400 calories" and someone trying to gain weight will look at the same burger and say "that's about 1500 calories", when in reality its somewhere around 900. Do that for 3-4 meals a day and boom, you've got your "I eat 4000+ calories and can't gain weight".
I do agree with you on people's reported caloric intake. Most people inaccurately record their eating habits. I use an app to get an idea of what my day was like.
If you put 100g of broccoli in a bomb calorimeter and burn it in pure oxygen, you heat it up by 34 kilocalories.
If you put it in a human digestive tract instead , the human can absorb anywhere from 0 to 34 kilocalories of food energy from it. We already have ample evidence that the food energy absorbed may be affected by the microbiome in the intestines, the preparation method used, the time of day, the time of year, and other foods that may have been eaten at around the same time.
But the calorimetry does establish a hard upper limit on absorbable food energy.
This is why non-ruminant herbivores with shorter digestive tracts--like the arctic hare--will engage in coprophagy. They will eat their "first-through" turds, because there is still some food energy in them. Ruminants do essentially the same thing with multiple stomachs and regurgitation.
If you aren't weighing your food and burning your poop in a calorimeter, you are inaccurately reporting your caloric intake. Even then, you can't really know for sure how much of that energy was absorbed for use by human cells, and how much was used to sustain your microbiome.
No matter what conditions you may have (or think you have) the above method will tell you exactly how much your total daily energy expenditure is, including what passes through you that you don't absorb, so you can know how much you need to eat to lose, maintain or gain.
I did say all the thing i posted there was for one meal. 10 Pcs of KFC Chicken, may be you should look it up? I bet it is over 3000 calories. And this was for JUST one meal! Likely Dinner, because lunch I would have rice, or Kebab with Chips. The Coke i drink. Which was 4L / Week. And Ice Cream.
Why did i remember all these so well? You may ask. Because at one point in life I was counting every penny because i spend too much on food. I was running out of money and I was desperate. I can't eat enough. I was constantly hungry. And Starving make me depress. I used to joke about How i eat all these and walked back to College in the cold weather i would burn off 1000 calories instantly.
Like some have suggested below, I guess it has to do with A) BMR, I think living in Cold weather make things a little different, and B) Not everyone absorb every Calorie they take! And that was my point. Some people simply don't absorb very well at all.
Sometime after the age of 24, something changed, I started absorbing, Within 2 years my weight went from barely 150Lb to 200Lb. It took me 2 years to slowly adjust my appetite. To eat less, and now days i am counting every calories I can to slowly shake off the weight. It is very hard, just as hard as I was trying to gain some weight many years ago.
Edit: And the 3 - 4 Pound Beef, Now i am older I know a single pieces of US prime Stripling is around 15Lb. My mum bought me over to my aunt's house and have dinner, They have half pieces of Prime Striplion left, that is about 7Lb. It was my first time ever to have US Prime beef and it taste unbelievably great! The dinner was self served and I was eating like there is no tomorrow. I had half of that pieces and was continually eating, my aunt found out and had to pull that striplion away from me to leave some for others. My mum then stare at me saying how i embarrassed her. At the time i thought I was hungry, why can't i eat more....... My mum later had to buy back a present to my Aunt as good gesture.
I was just playing soccer and basketball, not trying extra hard to bulk up for football or anything.
I'm not sure about that... allegedly, research suggests that most people have the same BMR (basal metabollic rate), and that there is nothing like "fast metabolism" (i.e. people get rougly equal amounts of energy from food).
What I was referring to above, and what the article referrs to (with Glicemic Index) is purely psychological - how much food you want to eat, and how hungry/satiated you feel. I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct.
At the end of the day calories in/out is still correct. It is just more complicated than how much food you eat and how much activity you engage in.
From where do you derive this certainty? There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals. Simply less efficient absorption of ingested calories would obviously make a huge difference, and I don't think there's any reason to think everyone absorbs calories with identical efficiency is there?
Sure, if A and B sit still for 8 hours there is no difference. But, many people are constantly in motion.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2163173/Toddlers-d...
"I'm still pretty sure that calories-in/calories-out theory is more-or-less correct."
Counting calories-in as calories absorbed is not exactly tangential, it may very well be the essence of the conversation.
It's quite simple: if you are gaining weight, eat less. The variation between calories marked and calories absorbed is not great enough to fundamentally matter.
Physics.
> There's plenty of anecdotal evidence indicating significant variance among individuals.
However, research evidence disagrees. So, the most likely culprit in the variance reported anecdotally isn't different BMR or efficiency of digestion, but different (even delusional) calorie-counting approximations.
Unless someone has overturned the laws of thermodynamics, it is correct. CICO rules over all, and it's simple but not easy to lose weight, due as you put it to psychological factors.
As for the research about most people having the same metabolic rate, here's a link: http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...
TL;DR - almost all people of the same height and weight will be within 200-300Kcal of each other BMR wise. There are some outliers, but not enough to cover all the people claiming to be special snowflakes. And even if someone does have a "slow metabolism", that changes nothing: they still had to overeat to get fat. Mass doesn't come from nowhere.
I still remember the days when I could eat 3 - 4 pound of beef, along side with mesh potato, or 12 inch Pizza, or whole bucket ( 10pcs ) KFC, per meal! And these meals would come with Coke as well. in Tea time i will eat Ice Cream, eat lots of yogurt etc.
I dont do lots of sports, may be once a week maximum. Otherwise I just sit down playing World of Warcraft or watching TV.
All while I don't gain 1 pound of weight! I had a VERY hard time gaining weight when I was in the age of 16 - 22. I even tried those weight gainer and protein. And does't work
Now that i am a lot older, trying to lose some weight, I find out a lot of these theories simply don't make sense when i was younger. If you are what you eat, then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat.
I think, everybody has a different body type that reacts differently.