out of context, that quote is really funny; what happens once you reach 4650 calories? you start violating the rules of thermodynamics?
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
(i know your body starts compensating for it and burning less calories, but still)
Well, we probably need to look at the direct quote again.
> There seems to be a hard limit on how many calories our bodies can burn per day, set by how fast we can digest food and turn it into energy.
Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but if one's body were to burn calories at 100% of this supposed possible rate, then by the time you'd reach 4650, a new day would start.
If digestion would top out at 4650 calories at day, with 24 hours per day, it would come down to 193.75 calories per hour. Or, in other words, it'd be about 3.23 calories per minute.
There are loads of videos on YouTube of what happens. You may or may not want to watch them. Spoiler alert: you vomit when you eat too much.
The vomit limit is probably higher than 4560 (which BTW has a suspicious number of significant digits), there might be a range between too many calories and vomiting where your body breaks down the food into waste without digesting any more nutrients/calories. Kinda like how if you eat too much vitamin C, you’ll just pee most of it out.
You don't need to be at the limit of human energy intake to see what happens to people when their energy expenditure greatly exceeds the energy available from food over a sustained time period; there is quite a lot of medical literature on the effects of such... er... malnutrition.