This is one in a long list of reasons why I continue to view calories as a useless measure. I don't really give a damn about how much water I can heat up by burning my food, that's not how my digestion system works. It was a reasonable enough analog when we had a very rudimentary understanding both of what's really in food and how digestion and the metabolic process works, but its horribly outdated today.

I can say having recently gone from coding at a desk 8 hours a day to working full-time on a farm with no heavy equipment, your food intake absolutely should increase. As long as I'm staying busy I can eat basically whatever I want and not feel sick or gain weight. That's not to imply that I don't still need to eat the right kinds of food as well, but volume and calorie count has no noticeable effect on me like it did when I had a sedentary job.