> but it's more complicated than how many calories you eat.

It is and it isn't. It's how many calories your body is able to metabolize. Usually those two numbers are similar, but the only way you're going to not get fat from putting 5000 kcal a day into your pie hole is if you have significant medical issues with your digestive system.

Also, it's odd that you'd say "it's not about calories" and link to an publication that literally has "in chronic over nutrition" in it's title.

> the only way you're going to not get fat from putting 5000 kcal a day into your pie hole is if you have significant medical issues with your digestive system.

As someone who, down a few hours of dance practice a day from my peak activity level, is running about 4,300kcal/day burn rate, I can imagine other ways to not gain weight on a 5,000kcal/day diet than “significant medical issues with your digestive system”.

With all due respect, that is crazy... A tour de France rider barely consumes 5,000 calories a day while competing in the tour de France. You either have a fantastic metabolism, are in high school and a multi-sport athlete, have a medical issue, or are miscalculating. Tangentially, there are oodles of Youtube videos about the diets of professional dancers... who practice 6+ hours a day... and none of them are even breaking 3k calories.

Edit: clarity.

> You either have a fantastic metabolism, are in high school and a multi-sport athlete, have a medical issue, or are miscalculating.

Or have significantly higher lean body mass than a Tour de France rider, since lean body mass is pretty much a multiplicative factor in energy consumption.

> Tangentially, there are oodles of Youtube videos about the diets of professional dancers... who practice 6+ hours a day... and none of them are even breaking 3k calories.

The thing about being a serious amateur dancer is you can be much bigger (both height and frame) than you could be and ever hope to go anywhere professionally in most styles of dance, which professionally tend to very rigorously filter for a very narrow range of body types (even, e.g., in ballroom, though classical ballet is the most notorious and perhaps the most extreme for this.)

You shouldn't be getting downvoted. You're being factually correct here, but a lot of people become armchair experts when the conversation goes to peak performance numbers.

It's definitely possible to burn 4300 a day if you're highly active and have a high FFMI (Fat Free Mass Index - the technical term for having a lot of muscle and low fat for your body size). Someone who has a FFMI between 24 and 25 - the peak without steroids - generally has a BMR in the high 2000s.

>Fat Free Mass Index - the technical term for having a lot of muscle and low fat for your body size

FFMI has nothing to do with having low body fat. It's literally the exclusion of fat from the index. You can have a high FFMI and a high BF%. A few years ago I had a DEXA scan done to assess my starting condition prior to starting an exercise regime. That scan showed me as having 30% body fat at a body weight of 260 lbs. Being 6'2" I had an FFMI of 23.4 and an AFFMI of 22.9. My calculated BMR at the time was in the 2200 kcal/day area. (Might be misremembering the BMR, but it definitely wasn't in the high 2000s.)

And it sends with "a new class of food and drink that is low- or no-cost to the consumer, convenient, savory, calorically dense, yet weakly satiating". Only one of those things is about calories.

Edit: we're not talking about people actually eating 5,000 calories per day. 5trokerac3 made that up in order to blame fat people for being fat.

It isn't about blame. Calories in/calories out is what we know influences weight. If you have some significant insight to contribute there, great! If not, please don't marginalise proper insight and factual knowledge by implying the person in question needs to feel bad for telling you.

Yet, weirdly enough, if a food item had all of those qualities except being calorically dense it wouldn't make people fat. Everyone one of those factors are things that lead to over eating, when paired with calorically dense you end up with the chronic over nutrition mentioned in the title.

Yes, but if it were missing the other factors and was only calorically dense, it also wouldn't make people fat.

That's like saying if cocaine made you feel like shit people wouldn't be able to get high on it. The issue isn't the food, it's the individual's brain.

It will make them fat if they eat it. Which is the very assertion you were disputing. The reasons why they might eat it have nothing to do with whether over eating makes you fat or not.